


The Stair Into the Sea

by paperiuni



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Adventure, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Gen, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Lighthouse Keeper AU, M/M, Magical Realism, Romance, Significant Handholding, Slow Burn, Strangers to Lovers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-11-24
Packaged: 2020-03-02 06:44:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 42,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18805834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: Magnus Bane, a writer down on his luck, comes to the village of Saintshead looking for one thing: a new story. He finds a remote headland full of secrets, and a young lightkeeper who might unravel both those riddles and the knots around his heart.(Or, the lighthouse AU.)





	1. Wait Until Darkness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rutherinahobbit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rutherinahobbit/gifts).



> Now for something completely different!
> 
> Namely, my first foray into proper AU. We have a heaped spoonful of summer romance, a sprinkling of magic and mystery, a dash of ghost story, and whole lot of ridiculous slow burn. Let me know what you think!
> 
> Ruth fixed everything for me once again. A thousand blessings on her house.
> 
> This story also has a soundtrack: [track listing on tumblr](https://poemsfromthealley.tumblr.com/post/189270288702/fic-mix-to-the-lighthouse) | [playlist on youtube](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7QvupXaFsbv1zFVhSmo1_VRsEjWxSgFs)
> 
> tumblr @[poemsfromthealley](https://poemsfromthealley.tumblr.com/)  
> twitter @[juneofthepen](https://twitter.com/juneofthepen)  
> If you want to live tweet, the story hashtag is #tsitsfic ♥

 

Magnus stepped off the coach onto the grizzled asphalt of the tiny bus station and thought, not for the first time, _You're out of your head, Bane. And the next bus service out of this place is the day after tomorrow._

Behind him, the cherry-red side of the coach shuddered into stillness with a hiss of brake hydraulics. The driver passed him his suitcase, mumbled a grainy, "Goodnight, sir", and trod off toward the main building. A plaque above the door spelled out in copperplate letters: Saintshead Station. The ramshackle building, like every other structure along the cramped main street, skewed to the east, bent by the harsh ocean winds.

Magnus had dozed for the hours that the coach had rumbled up the twisting peninsula. Now the edge of the land was a mere skip and a bound to the west from where he stood, with his satchel, suitcase, and the treasured camera tucked under his arm. The summer twilight was going down to night, and a breeze rasped in the trees that bordered the street. A total of perhaps six lamps lit this sole avenue of civilization within twenty miles. There was nothing resembling a taxi in sight. If he called for one, it'd probably be sent from the nearest actual town.

He'd come here to ask about the past. Time had dropped this village from her pocket a good while ago.

Shouldering the camera bag more securely, he started walking. It was a beautiful evening, anyway.

Where the paltry selection of stores and other cultured comforts ended, the street forked. He took the left-hand road, which clove into fallow fields, fragrant with wild grass, peppered with the fuzzy heads of cornflowers and humming with insects. _A mile from the station_ , his hostess-to-be had said on the phone. _Sign on the left side of the road. You can't miss it!_

He was starting to doubt the credibility of the high-spirited Miss Fray, when the promised sign rose from the roadside. Three wrought-iron arrows topped the hand-painted letters: Three Arrows Farm. He supposed it was good to reinforce the message. His bones had only just seen thirty-two, but they ached from the day's journey.

The driveway dove through the twists and turns of a rambling hedge, then spat him out on the yard of a farmhouse, the bared timbers at its corners hinting at long history. He smelled hay and horses, though the fenced meadow to the left looked empty.

So did the yard. The house was dark, and departing tire marks grooved the ground. The outbuildings loomed behind the house, but no movement made itself evident. No voice answered his holler. Through the door, he heard the doorbell ring its plaintive summons without response.

That left him sitting in the absolute middle of nowhere on this scenic summer evening. The nearest public phone was back at the bus station. There was no sign of Miss Fray or her—uncle, Magnus guessed, since the owner had introduced himself as Garroway on the phone.

He could always break a window. Maybe the one in the room he had paid a week's rent for in advance.

He sat down on the front steps of the house. He was just settling down for a proper brooding session, when the beam of a flashlight fell across his dusty shoes, then retreated a notch.

"Oh."

"Hello?" Magnus looked up at the young man holding the flashlight, lanky and startlingly tall from where Magnus sat. He frowned down at Magnus from under his messy hair with the kind of contemplation one might afford a small coin found in their shoe. His stare didn't seem to heed any time limits known to common courtesy.

Magnus's indignation bubbled up. "Excuse me. Do you live here?"

The man blinked, and Magnus could almost see some enchantment scattering from his eyelashes. He clicked a switch on the side of the house, and the porch lamp lit, bathing them both in soft yellow.

"Uh, you're probably Luke's new lodger? The one from Kirkwall?"

"I have to guess Mr. Garroway doesn't have a surfeit of those, if this is how he greets them."

In this better light, Magnus's new companion turned out to be wearing ragged jeans and a nondescript tee-shirt and be some way over twenty. He offered a half-contrite shrug.

"Yeah. Clary—Luke's daughter—she hurt herself pretty bad this evening, and he had to take her to St. Henrik's. That's the hospital in Briarwood. I came over to get you the spare key."

Magnus reminded himself that he was a long way from Kirkwall City and its amenities, such as the reliable presence of phones or a population density of more than five persons per square mile. Emergencies happened. He could bear that with tact. "I see. And you are?"

"Closest neighbor. Sort of." The man stepped up onto the sill of the window through which Magnus had looked in, rooted around on top, and came down with a key in his hand. He moved with the angled grace of someone that was at home in their body but not quite sure how to best turn it toward the world.

Magnus watched his unthinking, supple agility, and wondered, _Where did he come from?_

"Here." He dropped the key in Magnus's palm. "Room's made up for you upstairs. The kitchen's on your right when you go in, and there's instructions for—everything, pretty much, in the kitchen. They're cozy with guests." The last sentence segued untidily from rote guidance to personal opinion.

"Thank you," Magnus said, with enough primness that the real degree of his gratitude was in question. "I'm sure I can manage."

"If you can't, Maia or I will swing by in the morning. For the horses. Luke should be back by then though."

Magnus had been informed that there were horses, and also some sheep. A picturesque number of sheep, not one of those baleful flocks that had delayed the coach after Rosewell. He was not, in principle, opposed to animals.

He was, perhaps, opposed to cryptic neighborly types who emerged from the darkness without so much as a footfall sounding.

"If there's some kind of disaster, we're the third number written on the phone." With this parting word, the man took up his flashlight.

"Excellent." Magnus twisted the key. The beautiful blue door opened smoothly. Somewhere beyond it was a shower and a bed, and he wanted nothing more. "I'll be sure not to call. Good night."

He shoved his suitcase inside the door. The house enveloped him in the smells of old paper and new paint. The hallway rug was pleasantly rough under his tired feet. The wooden walls wore a charming gloss of age and a cornucopia of framed artwork, most of them signed  _C. F_. It seemed a place well lived in.

Feeling more stoical about the absence of his hosts, Magnus decided he could live on tea and the rest of his travel snacks until morning. Through the kitchen window, he saw the flashlight bob away across the yard, dance in the spokes of a bicycle parked at the end of the hedge, and then blink out.

He was half tempted to go out and check the yard for footprints. It could be said that he'd come to Saintshead chasing ghosts. If this prickly young man had not put the key in his hand, he'd have thought he'd found one.

Not the one he sought, though—and that was a thought for the light of day, not midnight.

He went up the crooked stairs to the attic and to what was hopefully the right room, and fell onto his face into the fresh linens. Sleep swallowed him whole.

 

*

 

Dawn found Magnus dawdling in bed until the easterly sun slid a sharp beam in between the curtain and the window frame and struck his face with surgical precision. Admitting defeat, he rose to find that he was no longer alone in the house.

The intrepid Miss Fray— _Clary_ , she insisted—had taken a fall down the stairs last night. Her concussion had been ruled minor, though, and she'd been let home to recover. She shook Magnus's hand, smiling fit to rival the sunshine, and confirmed that it was her art that filled the house.

The elusive Mr. Garroway— _Luke_ , he insisted—had a handshake that could have ground pebbles to grit, and an easy warmth about him that made Magnus forgive him as soon as the apology came out of his mouth. This was helped by the fact that Luke had found him a typewriter to borrow. Clary's friend would bring it over later.

That meant, in plain terms, that Magnus was set to begin his investigation.

He'd been through the archives of the Saintshead Gazette, preserved on microfilm back in Kirkwall. He'd perused every other news item he'd been able to get his hands on.

Nine years ago, a patrol ship of the Islands Guard had struck the reefs off Saintshead Cape. Seven bodies had been recovered. The rest, along with the wreckage of the vessel, lay buried under the black waters and toothy rocks of the cape.

The strange thing about the wreck was that the Saintshead Light had burned bright that night. The dangers of the reefs were known to every mariner between the Idris Archipelago and the continent. The weather had been clear. The sinking of the IGV _Blackbird_ should never have happened.

Like any good mystery, it had tickled public curiosity for a while and spurred a few tall tales and even the literary efforts of a poetic hopeful in Rosewell. Magnus had given this lyric interpretation a pass.

This sleepy village was the closest witness to the tragedy that he had. He just had to lure the answers from their hiding places.

He took his borrowed bicycle and mingled with the tourists and hikers and the odd local at the Saturday market. His rent included breakfast, but otherwise he had free run of the spacious Fray-Garroway kitchen. Advised by his arm, sore after lugging his suitcase all the way to the farm, he also purchased the least offensive rucksack the general store had. If he meant to go exploring, he should be prepared for... terrain.

He'd looked at maps. They never told you the whole truth.

"You're here about the _Blackbird_ , right?" Clary said, aflush with poorly hidden curiosity, as Magnus was putting away his groceries. For a convalescent girl, she looked pretty sprightly. Her carrot-red hair was braided back from her face, and her fingers were stained with soft pencil.

"If I were, where would you suggest I start? Short of stealing some diving gear and braving the sea."

She pursed her mouth. "You should be a little bit careful. There's families here who lost kids in the wreck. The Earlys used to run the bookshop, but they moved out some time ago."

Magnus kept his face neutral, as if the name weren't intimately familiar. "Thank you for the word of warning."

"You could ask Maia about the lightkeepers' records. They keep the original hand-written stuff at the lighthouse. Luke's sister was a lightkeeper back then."

Magnus paused at the dip in her tone. "Another topic to tread carefully around?"

"They weren't close. Luke and Cleophas. She left pretty soon after the wreck. I was—ten or eleven, so I don't remember that clearly." Clary closed her eyes. "Sorry, I'm a little dizzy. The lighthouse is at the end of our road. Big black and white tower. Can't miss it."

The weather was so clear and lustrous that you could have spotted butterflies landing on cornflowers from fifty yards away. Her assessment of visibility was more than fair.

"You'll be all right here?" It wasn't really his concern, but he was going to be living in this house for some time. A little friendliness would not go amiss.

She sat down at the end of the long trestle table that ran down the middle of the kitchen. "Luke will be back soon. Don't waste the daylight."

 

*

 

Magnus took the bicycle down the road. It seemed a sturdy, dependable vehicle for these cracked country routes. They might yet be friends. Certainly the chances were better with the bicycle than with the horses that did, indeed, inhabit the pasture behind the farmhouse. They never even lifted their ears from the grazing as Magnus blew past.

He went up a rise, then skated down the slope beyond, the briny breeze raking through his hair. The land turned untended, churned into lightly wooded cliffs that dominated the shoreline. The road ribboned out across a tapestry of exposed granite and emerald brush, then vanished into long pale grass that framed his course up the last sharp spit of land, upon which stood the lighthouse.

The Saintshead Light was reputed to be as old as the rock from which it seemed to have sprung. Beacon fires had burned on this spot for centuries, on spires of wood and stone. The round tower tapered to the quiescent lantern, its lenses glistening gemlike. A few buildings dotted the slope below the lighthouse itself, erected in a square around a vegetable patch and a small parking lot populated by a single van. Gnarled birches formed a tattered windbreak between the homestead and the sea.

Leaning his bicycle cavalierly next to two others in the banged-up stand by the foremost house, Magnus caught his breath. The house looked newly painted, but the stones of the foundation were rounded with age. No one would lay one like that these days.

 _Everything in this place is old_. _Made to last._

The thought grabbed him with unwelcome intensity. He shook his head to himself, when someone called out, "Sorry, we're not doing tours today! Times are on the notice board!"

Magnus pivoted, ready to wield the name Clary had given him to support his case, and stopped short.

There was the young man from the night before, in paint-smeared work gloves and a rather dashing, if accidental, streak of red earth in his soot-black hair. The sleeves of his tee-shirt were rolled up to the shoulder. For an inappropriate second Magnus stared at the lean muscles of his arms, the kind you built up with the careless effort of physical work.

At least Magnus had not hallucinated him. He looked entirely solid and mildly vexed under the sunlight.

"I didn't come for a tour. I was looking for a Maia," Magnus said. "Miss Fray said I might find her here."

"Ah." It seemed something had clicked for the young man, as well. "Maia's out for the day. I'm sorta in the middle of—"

"A wall?" Magnus's eyes flickered up to the paint in his hair, then the identical color of the house. Amusement nudged him.

"Yeah." The man had not missed his split-second glance. "Something on my head?"

"Just a bit of red." Magnus let out the chuckle, allowing it to pull away his tension. "I'm sorry. We weren't properly introduced. I'm Magnus Bane." He extended his hand. "Writer, curious soul, maker of inquiries, mostly in that order."

The man freed a hand and slapped it against his jeans leg. His fingers closed around Magnus's hand, quick and strong. "Alec. Lightkeeper. I guess that's the relevant part."

His accent wasn't local. Magnus didn't know why he hadn't caught it before, the soft burrs of the North Isle in his vowels. The local lilt of Rosewell Isle rang in there, too, but the foundations had been laid elsewhere.

Strange and stranger.

"A pleasure." Magnus flexed his fingers once. The warmth of Alec's grip seemed to linger there. "I know I came by unannounced, but might I have a word? I'm on a research trip, you might say."

Alec pondered this without pretence. "Let me finish up with the shed. The office is over that way."

Too late, Magnus realized he'd parked his bicycle on the private side of the yard. To be fair, there wasn't much in the way of signage, but the notice board nailed to the front of the adjacent building was a clue. Garden chairs were scattered under the dark-barked tree that arched its branches over the office porch, its unripe berries already a telling shade of golden-orange.

A black rowan. The warding-tree of the old folk, planted to guard the house from bad luck and unwelcome souls. Magnus had seen one in the botanical gardens in Kirkwall, but never in its natural habitat.

Maybe the custom had persisted here. The tree looked young, though, smooth and proud and vital.

"So," said Alec, startling Magnus from his contemplation. He was marginally tidier, sans gloves, sleeves down, and with an obvious damp curl in his hair where the paint had been. "What can I help you with, Mr. Bane?"

That rasped oddly rough in Magnus's ear. "Just Magnus, please. 'Mr. Bane' makes you sound like you're selling me something. Are you familiar with the shipwreck that happened here nine years ago?"

"Hard not to be." Alec led him up the porch and to the office. Two desks had been pushed together in the middle, and the rest of the space was covered in paper stacks, pens, and binders in enough colors that it looked like a rainbow had splintered across the room. There was probably a method to the chaos. A handsome, glossy black typewriter occupied center stage on the right-hand desk.

"That's Maia's baby. Touch it at your own risk," Alec warned, not unamused, as Magnus's hands inevitably hovered. "Do you know her?"

"No. I was given the impression she was in charge here. I see that's not quite the truth." Magnus let his gaze wander instead to a map of the archipelago on the wall. Every lighthouse and beacon on the shoreline had been recorded on it with a tiny lantern symbol. "The _Blackbird_ , then?"

"If you came all the way here, I'm gonna guess you know the basics." At Magnus's nod, Alec went on. "I don't know that much more. I've been here three years, about the same as Maia. There was one pair of keepers between us and the wreck. Ever since—uh. Since you're here, can I get you something? Coffee?"

Magnus managed to keep his eyebrow twitch to a pleasant amount of surprise. "As long as I'm not imposing."

There was a charm to the way Alec went from candor to courtesy between one sentence and the next. They both knew there was a script to this, but something kept knocking them off, subtle but constant. Their nighttime meeting seemed ever more surreal to Magnus.

He sat on a spare chair as Alec bustled about with the water canister and electric kettle on a corner table. Among the instrument readouts and standard-issue ring binders on the desk was a well-wrinkled paperback, tipped open page down when something had disturbed the reader. It looked like the least incriminating thing for a curious visitor to inspect.

Magnus picked it up, then did a silent double take.

 _Guns at Dawn_ , said the cover. _C. R. Grant_. It sported a desperate artist's view of a caravel braving towering storm waves in unlikely pastel shades. The pages were yellowing, the way cheap printing paper would, and Magnus had the most ridiculous urge to bury his nose in the book and seek the smell of snobby coffee and subpar red wine that should've been there, nestled between the pages.

 _You did it_ , said the voice, kind and gravelly, that he'd missed for a decade. _Though, what's the point of a pseudonym? Aren't you proud?_

He had been proud. Too proud to put his first real, personal achievement under the name that carried the weight of his family. He hadn't taken their money for university. He'd landed the publishing contract without their connections.

Instead, the cover bore the initials of his two best friends and a distant sibling of his own first name, slapped together in drunken inspiration. Catarina and Ragnor had approved, and clinked glasses to seal the matter.

"They haven't been able to hire anybody from around here since the _Blackbird_ sank," Alec said, and threw himself into the desk chair nearest to Magnus, his long legs askew in a way that should not have been as attractive as it was. "Sugar? I'll have to go to the house for milk, though."

"No, no, thank you. Black is fine." Magnus caught the steaming enamel mug Alec slid to him. "No locals at all? I thought it took a certain borderland spirit to enjoy this line of work."

"It might." Alec hummed into his coffee. A casual stillness came over him. Magnus fancied he had a fair eye for studying people, and this young man was a fascinating case. "I like it fine."

If there'd ever been a sentence that concealed an entire story, that might have been it.

"Can I ask, though? What's your interest in this?" Alec rapped his fingers—strong-boned, with fine, prominent knuckles, also distracting—on the table. "The _Blackbird_ is pretty much the biggest elephant in the room this village has—and with a place as tiny as this, there aren't many to fight it for space. Everybody knows about it, but nobody talks about it. You're not gonna make friends by pushing. It's personal for many of them."

 _It's personal._ Wasn't that always where the trouble started?

The coffee was strong enough to wake the stone under the house. Magnus sipped gratefully. He needed the jolting clarity of the caffeine.

He owed Alec no explanation. He could go and dig through another archive, find another report, another eyewitness or mourning relative. He and Alec had had a somewhat rude encounter over a key in the night, and then this short, circling talk over coffee.

Magnus was slow to make friends. However, he had learned the value of quick alliances. As easily as Alec seemed to move in this landscape, he was, by his own word, a newcomer. A stranger, perhaps, like Magnus himself.

Folding open his journal from his rucksack, Magnus slipped the photograph from the cover pocket. Without looking, he turned it so Alec could see: the broad, smiling face, the rakishly worn dress uniform. Magnus had always known that between a seafarer and the sea, there was narrow ground for anyone else. He'd loved him all the same.

None of that showed on the photo. It would be on his face if he lifted it, so he breathed, soft, covert, and gathered himself.

"I knew one of the victims," he said evenly. "First Lieutenant George Early. They never found his body."

"I'm sorry." It was a bland civility, a thing you said when someone brought up a tragedy. The look Alec gave Magnus was its direct, startling opposite: too open, too familiar, if not for the honest understanding in it. It was a subtle thread of kinship looped between them.

 _Here's someone that knows grief_ , Magnus decided. Not only the vague loss of distant elderly relatives, but the ugly, heart-wrenching absence of someone utterly beloved.

"I've got the logs from that day somewhere in the back," Alec said, firm and matter-of-fact. "Uh, Maia mentioned there were some personal journals from Cleophas Graymark. They're probably in the attic. The family didn't want 'em."

"And you're willing to let me at them?" Magnus raised a brow.

Alec huffed. "Assuming we can find them under all the cobwebs."

"It seems like you don't much care for the possible wrath of the population."

"I—" Alec rearranged himself, back straight, hands on his thighs. He had something of the soldier to his bearing. Magnus's throat felt thick. "Don't get me wrong. I like most of them, when I see them. This is a pretty lonely job—that part of the cliché is true. But they do things a certain way because that's how things have always been done. They'll say no to you just out of habit."

"But you won't?"

A crack spidered through Alec's steady posture. His gaze went to the wall, then back to Magnus. "I guess not. It'll be a change of pace." A sliver of a smile turned his lip, and oh, Magnus wanted to see how it might spark in his eyes. "You wanna go digging for ghosts in these parts, you'll need somebody who knows their way around."

"That sounds like an offer. One I'm happy to accept." Magnus raised his mug. "To our partnership, then."

After a lingering second, Alec chinked the rim of his mug against Magnus's. The smile stayed at the corner of his mouth.

 

*


	2. They Moved That Sign

 

Over the next few days, Magnus studied the lay of the land, both in the figurative and concrete sense.

He walked the roads the branched away from the village center, past farmsteads and tumbledown barns, through mats of juniper on dry rock and patches of woods that filled the wetter, warmer nooks of the terrain. The land was in its summertime glory, wild and clement.

His encounters with the people of Saintshead were a more mixed lot. More than once, he wandered into a conversational quagmire with his polite probes into the shipwreck. The wiry old woman in front of the general store, who'd worked up a pleasant chatter with him, pressed her mouth shut and left with a huff. The next day, the server in the café along the main street was so curt with him that he sidled out with his order mostly untouched on the table. The looks he got about the village slanted sidelong.

He wouldn't quite call it hostility, but it neared suspicion. He was an unknown element in this close-knit community.

Never one to let a turn of bad luck repress him, Magnus took himself back to the farm to ponder on another tack.

He was the only more long-term guest in the rooms Luke let out, and an early bird by nature, so he'd taken to joining his hosts in the morning. On Wednesday, Clary finished eating with speed and slipped off to whatever pastimes busied late teenagers during holidays in stamp-sized villages.

It probably involved the chatty boy in the shockingly painted van that had delivered Magnus's typewriter. Clary kissed Luke on his bearded cheek and was gone. Her head trauma had apparently healed well.

"She's had no fever since Sunday. Can't exactly keep her chained up in the house, in weather like this," Luke said, pouring Magnus a second cup of coffee. "Even if I did, Simon would break her out the second my back was turned. She's a firecracker. Takes after her mom."

Magnus entangled himself in how to point out the utter lack of family resemblance in this father and daughter pair. Where Clary was bird-boned, pale, and raucously freckled, Luke was broad-framed and dark-skinned, his manner calm in contrast to Clary's vivid impertinence. The absent mother had so far not been a topic in their small talk. "She seems like a good handful, though."

Luke indulged his bemusement. "Her mother and I were together. When Jocelyn died, I took her in. Now she wants to run the farm and put up an art gallery in the old barn."

 _Died_ , Luke said, without euphemism. His voice held a phantom of old pain, but it was a pain he'd accepted as a daily companion. Magnus understood that well. Jocelyn was, then, the woman with auburn hair and a stern quality to her smiles who featured in some of the photographs on the mantelpiece.

"That's a bold plan," Magnus said. "Is it just you and her?"

"Yeah." Luke's face closed. "We make do. She works harder than you'd think. Let her run free while she can."

"I don't claim to know anything about raising children, but I may remember how it feels to be that age. How you can feel so sure of your path."

At nineteen, Magnus had packed his life in a suitcase, taken his acceptance letter to the University of Kirkwall, and gotten on a bus to the capital. Clary appeared to have found her calling closer to home.

He realized he was probing at a sensitive issue. Luke was a steady, soft-spoken man, evidently tough to shake, but there seemed to be more than one gap in the ranks of his family. There was the sister that first Clary, then Alec had mentioned. This sister had left behind the papers at the lighthouse that Luke had refused to take.

Others in Saintshead had already rebuked Magnus's questions. He'd told Luke that he'd come here to look into the matter of the _Blackbird_ , and Luke had not turned him away from his home. However, that did not mean Luke would be eager to discuss the wreck, or whatever part his sister had or had not played in the circumstances surrounding it.

How was that for a conundrum? If Magnus found any answers to the mystery, would they bring solace or closure to anyone but him?

He did not know. A part of him had spent nine years wondering.

Alec had said he'd call when he had something for Magnus. It'd been three days, and Magnus was getting a touch impatient. The villagers were not best inclined to give him answers. He had resorted to writerly busywork, but you could only do so much reorganizing of notes and brainstorming of catchy opening lines before you ended up going in circles.

As if he even knew where to start with this story.

"Clary's always been like that." Luke rose to put the last of the dishes away in the sink. "Keeps going at what she wants, straight as an arrow."

Before Magnus could find a light enough reply to that, the phone rang in the hallway.

Circling as far into the kitchen as the cord allowed, Luke held the receiver out to Magnus. "For you."

Magnus had been expecting this call. His heart still tripped as Alec said, unvarnished, "I found the box. You might wanna come over here for it, if you're free this afternoon."

"Of course." Magnus steadied himself. "Thank you. I'll be there. At four?"

"That works," said Alec, and, with a terseness that seemed to be his common modus operandi, ended the call.

That suited Magnus fine. Their moment of unspoken understanding aside, Alec seemed removed from the whole disaster. Whatever the _Blackbird_ was for him, it was not personal, not in the way that wrote your every reaction to the topic with your heart's blood. He could be an ally of convenience—if an attractive, perplexing one.

Magnus had dug into more treacherous topics than this. A bit of an intellectual infatuation with his fellow investigator was harmless. If anything, it lent the work a pleasant spark.

He replaced the receiver on its hook. Luke had stopped in the doorway, his expression pulled by emotions at odds with each other.

"I had a sister," he said. "She heard the island. Sometimes people do, out here. Didn't do her much good in the end."

Luke's tone was ruled by deep, abiding resignation, as if he were commenting on the damage done by a passing storm. _She heard the island._ Like it—whatever it meant—were a law of nature or a quirk of fate. Something he could not change.

He went out the door, and left Magnus with the cooling shadows in the corners of the hallway. The question, like so many others, hammered on Magnus's mind, fruitlessly seeking a way out.

 

*

 

A young woman was tapping away at the typewriter, surrounded by a chop and swell of loose papers, as Magnus peered into the lighthouse office. A blue kerchief barely trammeled her rambling mass of curls, and the smart button-up and uniform pants she wore looked too staid on her. She fixed Magnus with a sharp glint of a look.

"Right, you're Alec's mystery visitor." Her eyes mellowed as Magnus introduced himself. "He's evicted about half the dust bunny population in the attic trying to find your stuff. He's somewhere around the house."

"You're the fabled Maia, I believe?" Magnus crooked his smile a little, and elected to ignore the suggestion that Alec had taken any unusual interest in him.

"My fame precedes me." She pried the full page from the typewriter and inserted an empty sheet. "I'd love to chat, but I've got to type up these logs and I have a bunch of nosy tourists to herd at five. Stay in the house if you don't want to trip on small children."

"I see the romantic image of the desolate seaside beacon is alive and well."

A more amused gleam came onto her face. "The romance definitely helps us keep this heap of junk up and running."

Magnus didn't think he'd ever spent two thoughts on the Commission of Idris Lights, but the mercies of public finance were probably harsh on such distant locations as Saintshead Cape. He recalled Alec, spending his free time repainting the aged buildings.

"I should leave you to it."

"Alas," Maia said, a hand to her heart. "I'll come by later, if you're not planning anything too clandestine."

"Not for my part." Magnus swept his hand in a grandiose arc in reply. "I suppose you're better equipped to assess your colleague."

"Alec doesn't know the _meaning_ of guile. He probably thinks it's a kind of dessert." There and then, Magnus decided he liked her. She pointed in the direction of the dwelling house, visible through the office window. "His door is the one at the far end."

The door, when Magnus reached it, turned out to have a brass knocker instead of a doorbell. His fingers tarried on the dim, smooth metal, then went to his windswept hair. He knew he was presentable, though he'd had to compromise on dashing in favor of practical. All this open air and cycling around was doing a number on his usual debonair style.

He was still in mid-thought when the door opened. Alec left it slanting open and wandered back inside. "Are you gonna come in?"

Having lost the window for an answer, Magnus did, nudging off his shoes as he went.

Past the tiny entryway, there was a space that combined living room and kitchen, with a gas stove on a counter that abutted an honest-to-goodness brick fireplace. Drying dishes were lined up in a rack next to a well-polished sink. On the left, a ragged leather couch crouched in the gloom under the ladder steps leading up to a sleeping loft. Where you'd have expected the couch to be lay a mattress lost under heaped cushions. The copy of _Guns at Dawn_ that Magnus had spotted in the office rested on top, nearly finished.

He took a step along the woven rug that made a striped path across the wooden floor to the kitchen side. More books filled the shelf on the right-hand wall, accompanied by a few framed photographs.

Alec, now at the kitchen table, watched him take in the room. "The couch is broken, so it got banished. Haven't had time to look for a new one."

"No fixing it, either?"

"One spring too many gave up the ghost." Alec slouched into a red spoke-back chair. A potpourri of journals cluttered the table, from a couple of leather-bound ones to flimsy school notebooks. Taking Alec's manner as permission to be at his ease, Magnus sat down.

"You've been busy." He folded open the first page of a journal. Half of the delicate metal clasp on the cover had broken off.

"Yeah. I do have a job here," Alec said, with a crackle of dry humor. "Turns out, there's a lot of crap in the attic, and nobody bothered to mark the boxes. Some of these are—I'm not sure what they're in, but that's not any alphabet I was taught in school."

Magnus's brows furrowed. "A code of some kind."

"Maybe, or a personal shorthand. Most of it is mundane stuff. She tracks the weather, what animals she's seen, what flowers are growing. Then there's a page in literal chicken scratch, and then back to nature reports."

"Life out here might not have provided much entertainment." Magnus leafed through pages of looping handwriting, until he landed on the first that was instead filled with small, angular symbols. They were a writing system, to be sure, but at a glance, he could not say where to begin deciphering them.

It was not like he'd expected this to be easy.

"It's pretty different from the capital, huh?"

Alec's question stole sideways into Magnus's attention. His eyes jarred up to meet Alec's.

"Saintshead," Alec supplied. "It's got to feel sleepy after Kirkwall."

"I've been here for all of four days. I'm not that easily bored." Magnus huffed in echo of Alec's earlier arid timbre. "It's a change, but it's not like I plan to stay for good. Variety is the spice of life, no?"

Alec's gaze meandered past Magnus's shoulder. "My—my sister studies in Kirkwall, at the technical university. She seems to like it a lot."

"You've never been?"

On a reflex, Magnus traced the path of Alec's eyes to the photos on the shelf. In the nearmost one, a blond, late-teenage boy had his arm slung around the shoulders of a girl who could only be the sister in question. She had the same unruly air as the boy, but her raven hair and warm beauty recalled Alec to an uncanny degree.

"A couple times. I trained near there." With a near-silent sigh, as if deliberating with himself a second, Alec held the photo closer to Magnus. "Jace and Isabelle. My brother and sister. He's adopted. I don't mean that in a bad sense, though he is an asshole sometimes. I'm just one right back."

"Oh, I quite understand family doesn't begin and end with blood," Magnus said. "I don't have siblings, but I've been lucky enough to find friends who are as good as that."

He stood to peruse the other pictures: one of the three siblings together, a couple with the people lost as tiny shapes in landscapes, and then, at the back, turned so you could barely see it, was a formal photograph with the three children in a row next to a grave woman and a man with a studiedly bland expression.

It gave off a different feeling than the ones with only the siblings. They were little windows into easy, impetuous love, but the family portrait was austere. Arranged in stark, somber lines.

"Do they visit often?" he found himself asking. "It's a bit of a trip from Kirkwall."

"Izzy writes." Alec made a sound too wistful to be a laugh. "Jace puts stupid postscripts in her letters."

"I know how that goes. I'm expecting Catarina to give in and start calling me at the Garroway residence for nightly complaints any day now." Magnus let himself think about Cat, draped across the faded cobalt armchair in the foyer of their shared apartment, launching into a creative tirade about her shift. It would only be a month or two until he'd be back. A pang went off in his chest, anyway.

"And that's the—"

"My best friend. One of the two. I live with her at present. The other one would never be able to share his space."

Alec hummed. "I kinda figured I couldn't, either, but Maia's a pretty problem-free housemate. It helps that we only share the storage and the bathroom." He gestured at a door in the corner of the kitchen. "This used to be a house for a keeper's whole family, but we just split it down the middle."

"Mmm, so you're in fact _two_ lyrically lonely hearts on a cliff by the sea?" Magnus propped his palms on the back of his chair, allowing a glimmer into his voice.

"Are you asking—" Alec's face underwent a charming scrunch of confusion, his eyes widening, and Magnus's breath scraped in his throat. "Are all writers this twisty, or is it just you?"

"An occupational hazard, I'm afraid." He ducked behind a semi-ironic smile.

"Right," Alec said. "We're co-workers. And friends, I guess. She's a little hard to read on that account."

 _While I'm sure you are an open book_. Bracing himself, Magnus picked up the journal. "Perhaps we should get some work done. I assume you have some keeperly duties to attend to later."

"In the evening." Alec's fingers danced a restless patter on the table before he caught himself. "Until then, I'm... all yours."

Magnus muffled a choked sound against the well-worn leather cover.

 

*

 

The restive energy between them sloped down into a companionable calm.

Magnus got out his own journal and began a fresh page to jot down anything that stood out to him. Alec made coffee and left a mug at Magnus's elbow, the brew tarry and fragrant, something fancier than the stuff at the office. The afternoon turned through its phases: the din of Maia's tourist group came and went, and the light shifted slowly from pearl to pallid amber at the window.

While Alec went through the slimmer volumes of their peculiar materials one by one, Magnus pored over the first journal. Beyond the odd muttered comment, they worked in silence. A time or two Alec paced the length of the room, or dropped by the yard, following the invisible loops of whatever routine he had with Maia.

If nothing else, Magnus was getting familiar with the seasonal cycles of the headland. There were notes on spring storms and the level of the sea, on the ripening of apples and full harvest moons, as well as the wild flora and fauna. No clues as to the nature of the cipher revealed themselves. He might have to smuggle the journal to his room to have proper time with it.

Not that the prospect of spending more time with Alec didn't stir him. Alec was good reading company: focused, quiet, and very easy on the eyes, limned in the sunlight.

Magnus snapped his attention back to his own notes for about the third time.

"Alec," he said, "look at this."

Alec rustled to his feet and rounded the table, but Magnus could only drag the tip of his finger along the column of his own script. He'd started idly tabulating the animals Cleophas had observed, because at this stage anything could be significant, and—

"Cloud raven, Sinner's Ledge," Alec read aloud. His shoulder pressed into Magnus's, his second and third fingers into the crook of Magnus's thumb as he nudged his hand aside. Magnus felt his pulse kick into a silent throb under his skin. "I know _where_ that is. I have no idea what a cloud raven is."

With a slow, resolute motion, Magnus reclaimed his hand. Alec's fingers, long and gently calloused, curled under his own palm. The air shifted back between their bodies.

Words. Magnus could do them. They were his livelihood, in fact, so he rather depended on that ability.

"I don't think she means a real animal." Pointing at the page with his capped fountain pen, Magnus re-spun the unraveled thread of his thought. "This—this one sighting repeats: cloud raven, Sinner's Ledge, last quarter moon."

He rifled through the cover pocket of his journal again, the tiny trove of cherished documents there, until he found the newspaper clipping. _Islands Guard vessel lost off Rosewell Isle_ , declared the crinkled header.

"The date almost matches. It was a quarter moon the night before the _Blackbird_ sank."

Alec's expression skewed into inscrutability, then ended up at the same pensive frown he'd worn all afternoon. "The moon was just full. Last quarter is four nights from now."

Magnus swallowed a laugh, but it might have gotten caught in his eyes. "It shouldn't surprise me that you know the exact phase of the moon. Any idea when Jupiter might next be visible?"

"No, but there's a meteor shower in a couple of weeks." Alec hesitated, as if he weren't sure if he should wind himself in Magnus's banter. "Speaking of. You met Maia, so I figure you should meet the third of us, too, proper-like."

"I should?" Magnus could remember no evidence of a third resident. "By all means."

"It's just the right time," Alec said, a boyish, hopeful whim breaking through his guard. He seemed unaware of that, of the way it lit up his face, like a signal light through ocean mists. "Come on."

 _Oh,_  Magnus told himself, blinking at the glow of Alec's sudden cheer, _Watch yourself, Bane._

 

*

 

Sunset shadows curled, soft and purple, in the hollows of the slope. Alec led them past the birches and up the rise, and something lurched in Magnus's chest when he understood there was only one place they could be going.

 _The third of us._ Magnus wanted to laugh. Alec put up a decent front of stoicism, but there was sentiment in him, after all.

The lighthouse loomed to a height of maybe seventy feet, its black and white-striped side alight with the westering sun. Alec turned a key, and they stepped into an entryway. Though the day had baked the cliffside to a heat that still wafted off the rocks, the interior was cool and smelled of dry stone and machine oil.

"How old is she?" Magnus ran his hand along the sky-blue paint of the wall. What a fanciful color on such a utilitarian structure. "He? What's the right word here?"

"It's a building," Alec said. "Maia insists it's a she, though. Something about women and survival in tough conditions. Anyway, it's a hundred and thirty, masonry, made of local stone. Stairs to the gallery are right behind you."

"I see you haven't escaped the tour guide duties, either."

"Maia does most of it, and her friend Simon helps out. I'm not that much of a people person."

"I wouldn't be so sure," Magnus said, a little low, safely to Alec's back. "Everyone has their charms, it's just a question of who they work on."

They started up the clanking iron grid stairs, where busy feet had worn away most of the paint. Little square windows let in light as they completed each revolution of the spiral staircase.

"Old living quarters," Alec would say at each closed door they met, or "storage area," or "watch room," leaving these corners unexplored for now, and then they emerged through a hatch into the lantern room.

The sky showed through the glass that served as the walls of the octagonal room, but it was the beacon, encased in its numerous lenses, that captivated Magnus at once. It shore their reflections into a hundred curved slivers, towering above even Alec's considerable height.

"Second-order lens," Alec said, "been here for over a hundred years. The light's electric now, though. They used kerosene at first."

"She's magnificent." Magnus walked carefully around the room, his fractured image following him. "I have dozens of questions and I don't even know where to start."

"I do." Alec went to the door to the railed gallery that encircled the lantern room. "If you don't have a problem with heights."

"None whatsoever." The thrill that shivered down Magnus's spine and to the soles of his feet had an entirely different cause, or rather, causes.

The wind buffeted across them in a rush of salt smell, and Magnus squinted against the crimson glare on the horizon, the sun spilling across the sea and the small rocky islands flung off the coastline. To the north, the shore bent into a shallow cove, then climbed into tall, jagged hills whose sheltered landward sides were blanketed in trees. The lights of Saintshead itself were coming alive to the southeast.

Magnus breathed in deep and let himself marvel.

Alec was leaning over the painted steel railing, uncaring of the drop, utterly at home in this place. He raised his voice to say, "That's Sinner's Ledge, the highest hilltop over the cove. You feel like a hike? There's a path. Of sorts."

"Of _sorts_?"

"If the weather stays good, we can take a day. You don't look like somebody who's afraid of a little legwork."

"I'll take that as a challenge." Stepping up next to Alec, Magnus wrapped his fingers securely around the railing. Something quickened in him, a sense of possibility that he hadn't felt in a while.

He didn't yet dare think where it would lead him, but he was ready to follow.

 

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Saintshead Light is roughly based on the Old Head of Kinsale lighthouse in Ireland, but I've taken some liberties with how lighthouses and their keeping actually (used to) work. Because this is primarily a romance fanfic with a supernatural bent. ♥


	3. So Alive and Alone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I wrote this entire draft in 36 hours, which is very fast for me, and then foisted it upon Jilly and Ruth, who actually made it make sense. Not without you, darlings, not without you.

 

Clary stomped up the back porch, a ripe waft of horse in her wake, and jolted Magnus from his reading. Rattling around on the ground floor, shedding rubber boots and mucky clothes, she eventually reached the kitchen, then piped up with, "You want any lemonade with your thinking?"

"If you'd be so kind," he called back.

Somewhere along the last week, Magnus had claimed a corner of the west-facing porch as his ruminating spot. Other guests came and went, mostly boaters who turned south or west at Saintshead, avoiding the reefs, or hikers on the trails that hugged the straggling coastline.

He'd spent the morning reading through his notes on St. Edmund's Reef, the infamous ship-killing barrier that bordered Saintshead Cape. The shipping lane running past Saintshead followed one of the few deep-water routes on the coast. The tally of vessels that had foundered there was remarkable, even with the record growing patchier as one reached further back in history.

Magnus had begun to wonder; had any of those ships shared the fate of the _Blackbird_? Sunken on a clear night, with a skilled crew at the ropes?

Nine years ago, there had been attempts to dive for the wreckage. The murky waters, chancy currents and autumn's chill had hindered the work, and the sea ice, when it came, had put a stop to it. The Islands Guard had not resumed the effort, leaving the rest of the crew to be buried in empty coffins.

Magnus had not gone to the funeral. Instead, he'd drunk himself to such a nadir that he'd failed most of his classes and worn through even Catarina's semi-divine patience. The following New Year's marked the only time she'd ever outright screamed at him. That teary ultimatum of love and frustration had possibly saved his life.

In the end, with some help, he'd pulled himself to his feet. Gone back to his degree. Set aside the pen name and spent three years polishing a spare, stylish, coming-of-age story that had won him critical acclaim, as well as a modest literature award in a neighboring country.

He sent a copy of the novel, unsigned, to his father's office.

Two more serious novels followed, and he entertained some fancies of quitting his freelance work and dedicating himself to fiction for good. Now, however, his once-supple prose seemed to have withered on the vine. He'd stalled on two manuscripts and tossed a third out the window on a wine-soaked evening of creative frustration—and then collected it from the sidewalk, because he wasn't a complete fool.

He wrote articles, translated a poetry collection, lived on the words of others. He began dreaming of George again, of the short two years that they'd had.

A change of some kind was needed. That much was clear.

Clary pushed a glass with a pink straw and a slice of lemon stuck on the rim in front of him. Balancing her own glass, she hoisted herself to sit on the banister.

"Thank you, my dear."

"Enjoy it while you can. This might be the last sunny day we get for a while." She glanced at the haze of clouds over the horizon.

The ocean had turned its chilly cheek against the shore and worn away the sultry days. Out here on the verge of the sea, that meant immediate extra layers, midsummer or not.

Magnus said, "It'll be nicer to climb those hills of yours in cooler weather, though."

Clary lifted a brow. She'd taken a candid attitude to him: he'd expected the urban gloss of the capital to gild him for a while, but where Clary relished his anecdotes, her questions had no latent wanderlust to them, no yearning to take flight to a wider world. Her roots were secure in this weatherbeaten soil.

"Oh, fine." Magnus relented under her stare. "Alec is taking me— _we_ are going on a hike. For my investigation."

"Okay," she said, chipper. "I don't think I've ever seen Alec voluntarily spend so much time with somebody that's not Maia. Well, he and Luke play chess sometimes. In silence."

Magnus had gone back to the light station the day before, and passed the afternoon perusing Cleophas's journals. He'd barely seen Alec, and yet he wanted to flinch like he'd been found out. "I thought fishing was the go-to non-speaking activity for the discerning gentleman."

"I guess." Clary sipped her lemonade. "I can't imagine being stuck on a boat with him."

"Do I detect a touch of wariness?"

She bobbed the leg she'd folded over her other knee. "Alec and I sort of got off on the wrong foot. I'm just practicing diplomatic avoidance. Maia comes out to hang with us, but he never really does, so..."

The several years of age difference might also play a part there, Magnus thought. The counter-argument was that the social circles of the village must be tiny, and you had to make do.

Unless you were not, on principle, inclined to make do.

"And now you're trapped in a loop of mild mutual hostility. I see." Magnus fiddled with the straw. The ice cubes crackled in the glass. "Might I ask for your assistance on another matter? The bookshop in town seems to be stuck in limbo, so is there anywhere I could find something on the history of your reef?"

"There's a library in Briarwood. The library bus comes here on Tuesdays, too. You can use my card if you swear you won't lose any books."

"That's very generous of you."

"Or—oh, I know! The Rosewell Maritime Museum, just outside Briarwood. We went there on a class trip. They've got a whole section on like, smugglers and pirates and shipwrecks and—and such."

Floated by her enthusiasm, Magnus perked up. "I'll have to make it an outing."

"How about that _other_ outing?" She looked askance at Magnus's burnished boat shoes. "You'll want some proper shoes, or Alec is gonna leave you in the first ditch you trip on."

"Harsh, Biscuit." Magnus certainly would have liked to envision Alec as a more chivalrous spirit.

"The truth hurts." She hitched up a shoulder. "Luke's hiking boots might fit you. I don't think he's ever worn them."

"Is this how you treat everyone from a place with a population of more than five thousand? As hapless ingenues in the face of a slice of nature?"

"No," Clary said, "but I've seen your shoes, and they're nothing to write home about. I tidy up your room, remember?"

"All right, Miss Fashion Police, you win." Magnus groaned in theatrical defeat. "Hiking boots it is."

 

*

 

Saturday brought a short call from Magnus's agent, Raphael, about a book fair in Kirkwall that was hoping to sign him on as a speaker. It was in two months, so obviously Magnus had been a back-up option. That was not surprising, as it'd been a while since he'd put out anything new, but he agreed summarily.

This was followed by a call from Catarina, to let him know that shockingly, the capital was still standing, even without him, and any crowds lamenting his departure and rending their garments were conspicuously absent.

Magnus laughed, then confessed he missed her.

"I've barely had the time," she shot back, without the slightest sentiment. "Dot wants to see all the sights."

Cat had a temporary housemate for the summer. Her friend Dot was in Kirkwall for some manner of intensive language course, and had agreed to cover Magnus's share of the rent in exchange for the use of their guest room-slash-home office.

"Of course I miss you," she said then. "I came home from Elias's birthday party last night, and I tried sitting barefoot on the balcony and drinking bad champagne. It's not the same without you."

"I love you." He didn't quite know why that came out of his mouth.

"I know." She hummed. "What's it like out there? You charm all the locals yet?"

"A little," Magnus said, trying not to let that thought run away from him. "I'm sensing some resistance, though. Local superstition, or some such hogwash. You'd think I personally took a fire axe to the bottom of that ship."

"That's a bit dramatic." Her voice went soft.

"It is." He slumped against the wall in the hallway. He could see her crystal clear in his mind's eye: wrapping the kinked telephone cord around her fingers, frowning and solicitous.

"I know this won't bring him back." He'd said that to her before, when he'd first had the idea to visit Saintshead. "I'm not... relapsing. It's a beautiful little place. I think I'm making friends—and no, not the 'I fucked her in the bathroom and locked you out for an hour' kind of friends, Cat, _please._ "

That had been a one-time incident. Magnus had yet to live it down. Catarina made a noise that was the verbal equivalent of a kindly poke in the cheek. "I didn't say anything. I wouldn't blame you if you were, as long as you fuck them somewhere civil."

"Always, these days."

"More importantly, you're deflecting."

"I'm fine. I promise. It's going a little slowly, and I'm still establishing facts, but there's a story here. One that's going to be worth telling."

Her sigh shuffled along the line. They shared silence across the distance.

"Whatever lets you close that chapter, darling." She'd said that to _him_ before.

The conversation meandered into more ordinary topics, Cat's latest incidents in the emergency room, places Cat might yet take Dot in Kirkwall, the poetry they were both failing to read for their monthly book pact. It was only the thought of their phone bill weeping for mercy at the long-distance charges that made Magnus end the call in reasonable time.

Magnus only realized later that he had not spoken a word to Cat about his encroaching fascination with the tall, dark and broody lightkeeper. He'd mentioned Alec, then skimmed ahead. And this was Catarina, who knew about every embarrassing crush and half-baked tumble Magnus had ever had. While Ragnor pretended to sigh and scoff at their heartaches, Magnus and Cat had always shared, for better or worse.

This time, something had held him back, and he couldn't put his finger on what it was.

 

*

 

On Sunday, Alec showed up in the banged-up, dirt-colored car that served as his and Maia's shared civilian vehicle, and told Magnus that if they stepped lively, they'd make it up and down the hill well before dark.

Magnus had tried out Luke's hiking boots, then acquired his own. His old sneakers were already under duress with all the milder cross-country walking he'd done. He threw his packed rucksack in the backseat and tried to look prepared. If Alec had comments, he kept them to himself.

They drove up a road that petered from asphalt to dirt, and finally curled into a turnaround nearly overrun by wild flora. Purple crowns of fireweed and thickets of raspberry bushes—escapees from a village garden, no doubt—spread over the shallow valley where the road ended.

"You know how to handle a compass?" Alec laid open a much-folded hiking map, faded with use. "We're here, and that's Sinner's Ledge, across the valley to the northwest, up that gorge over there, and then we're on the trail to the top. It should be pretty smooth going."

Dutifully, Magnus absorbed the route as far as he could see it. "I know the rudiments. I didn't bring a compass, though."

"Here." Alec put a pocket compass on a chain in his hand. Set in a lidded brass frame, the wind rose was encircled by degree indicators in delicate black and blue. The arrow-shaped needle trembled as Magnus weighed the compass in his palm. It was slightly heavy and oddly beautiful.

"You won't need it?"

"I've done this hike before," Alec said, nonchalant. "It's steep in places, so uh, feel free to shout at me to take breaks. Better to go slow and steady."

That sounded strangely like Alec were reminding himself. Magnus tucked the compass into his thigh pocket. "Duly noted."

In spite of his warnings, Alec fell into easy step beside Magnus as soon as the faint path allowed this. The overcast day was crisp with a breeze that slithered in from the sea. It gained vigor as they scaled the rugged root of the hill, snagging at their clothes, ruffling their hair into gentle tangles. Magnus began to suspect that his efforts to break in the new shoes would not save him from blisters.

In this, too, Alec seemed to be a boon companion. Even when he ranged ahead, he never let Magnus lag too far behind. He waited patiently as Magnus dug out the camera for too many shots of the horizon and the valley stretching below. Among their spots of conversation, he pointed out loose rocks and treacherous scree, and finally cut Magnus a walking stick from a young aspen.

"Don't step on roots. Just the ground. We're not trying to lose pursuers here."

Magnus burst into laughter. "That's very Robin Hood of you. Sounds like someone's read too many adventure stories recently."

Alec went _pfffft_ in a way Magnus hadn't thought him capable of but delighted in discovering he was. "You've been spying on my bookshelf."

"If you want to know a person's character, take a look at what they read," Magnus said sagely. "For my money, _you_ enjoy capers, deeds of daring, and high romance much more than you'd like to let on."

"Look," Alec retorted, heat building under his words, "the TV shows two channels, and that's when the wind's not in the wrong direction. The bookshop closed last year, and I don't have time to drive to Briarwood every time I finish something. You get your kicks where you can, in this kind of place."

"Oh." Magnus frowned, his merriment gone. "You think I'm judging you."

"Um." Alec scanned the sky for a sweeping second. His shoes scuffed the ground. "No, no, I don't. I just—I didn't mean it like that."

Magnus had struck a nerve, but he wasn't sure where it led. Alec was a bewildering mixture of frank statements and guarded inner life, and Magnus had brushed too close to something he did not want known.

"It's all right." Magnus jabbed his new walking stick into the rough bottom of the path. "Let's move on."

They did. The wind seemed louder in the absence of their voices.

 

*

 

They rose from the gorge to the rock-strewn face of the hill. The cold kiss of the wind turned into a fanged rake across exposed skin. Magnus ducked deeper into his windproof jacket, which did not quite live up to its name. The trail snaked back and forth between the scattered stones.

In a tricky spot, Magnus's foot slipped, but Alec, quick as a thought, seized his milling hand and broke his tumble. Bracing against Alec's hand, he felt Alec brace for his weight in turn, until he had his balance again. He nodded his thanks, not quite to Alec's face. They bent their heads under the wind—or so Magnus told himself—and forged on.

Magnus took a few pauses to snap more photos, of the colors of the moss that grew in the lee of towering boulders, of a rill that sluiced down the rock and, when he sipped from it, tasted like the sky, icy and pure. Once he caught Alec on the film: shading his eyes with a hand, gazing up at the unseen summit. He appeared rather like a trailblazing hero from his contentious novels.

It was hard work to chase the peak. It always seemed to be right ahead, only for the hillside to keep rolling on, bare and cragged. Magnus did his best to keep his eyes open and alert. The riddle in the journal gave precious little for them to go on. _Sinner's Ledge. Last quarter moon._

Was it the place or the time that mattered? The moon would be in its last quarter tonight, but this was not a comfortable place to linger.

Alec had lapsed into quiet. He looked at his wristwatch, then at the shifting clouds. Magnus crouched into some low brush, his search revealing an abandoned bird's nest, still cradling bits of eggshell and tufts of down. He reached for the camera again.

"Find something?" Alec stirred at the click of the shutter.

"I'm just documenting." Magnus put the camera back into the case, unwilling to let it hang around his neck if he tripped again. His fingers dwelled on the initials written in careless marker strokes under the case cover.

Alec was a watchful presence behind him. _Those are not your initials_ , his silence suggested.

"Can we sit?" Magnus gestured to the left of the trail, where the slope dipped into a heather-covered hollow. "I should have some tea left."

The tea warmed Magnus's chattering bones, though being out of the wind surely did as much. Even Alec wrapped his hands firmly around his mug. They huddled down into the dry shrub, nearly shoulder to shoulder, and the last of the earlier tension flaked away from Magnus.

Maybe it was yesterday's talk with Catarina that lent strength to his memories today. He picked up the camera to put it away, then opened the cover instead. Traced a fingertip over the _G. E._ Alec had not asked, but his silence had a small, curious weight to it.

"George was from Saintshead," Magnus said, surprised by the steadiness of his voice. "You visited his parents' bookshop, it sounds like."

Alec nodded by degrees, as if easing himself into the revelation. "I figured. I heard them mention his name once or twice. It's a small village," he added, after a second's delay. "You know what seems weird to me? It was a major accident, but there's no memorial. Like, I don't know, a statue in the cemetery or a plaque in some nice spot with a view of the sea."

"You're right." It struck Magnus as an obvious lack, now that Alec had mentioned it. "I didn't consider that. I may have been avoiding the cemetery."

Alec bit the inside of his lip. The dark surface of his tea rippled in the mug. "I understand. Graves make it real."

Magnus almost put a hand on his knee in instinctive empathy. Here it was again, the desolate shore of grief where they both had stood at some point.

"That's his." Alec pulled them both back. "The camera."

Magnus allowed himself to look instead at the misty meeting point of stone and sky above. "Yes, it is. It's well on its way to antiquated, but it's a reliable gadget. He used to go everywhere with it. Had his own darkroom. I haven't gone that far, but I still..."

"Document," Alec said, when Magnus didn't go on.

"A touch obsessively, I fear, when the mood strikes." The boxes of accumulated photographs were something of a hassle whenever he and Cat moved, but then, so was their combined book collection. The books had done less to keep him sane. "Less often these days. But being here certainly puts it in a new perspective."

"Was he... There's an Islands Guard base at Seaward Point. Was he stationed there?"

"Yes," Magnus said. "When he died. In Kirkwall, when we met."

The clean, restless air felt heavy with memory. The first mock-clever comment Magnus had made about liking a man in uniform. The dark beer they drank, because the shithole of a bar they ended up in had nothing else decent. The watery dawn that found them still on the pier, mussed from drinks and kisses and a night without sleep.

He hadn't allowed himself to remember that night in a long time. Not as more than forced flashes brought on by circumstance.

Nearly twelve years later, he sat on a hillside with someone else, holding a mug of cooling tea, his blood still warm in his veins. Alive and alone.

Alec had not moved. He was good at waiting, that much Magnus had gathered. The truth, the one this whole halting conversation had been leading up to, hovered on Magnus's tongue.

"We were together for two years," he said. "That's why I came here."

It was a sliver of the truth, a delicate segment shaved from a hard, ugly lump that still seared him when he grasped it too tightly.

Alec took the thermos, filled Magnus's mug, and capped it again. "Didn't bring any whiskey. If I had, I'd pour you that."

"I appreciate the thought." Magnus chuckled. It rang hollow, but not as badly as he'd feared.

At the edge of Magnus's downcast vision, Alec's fingers tugged at the drawstring at the hem of his jacket. Tighter, looser, tighter again. Nerves, bubbling under his stolid shell.

Magnus turned away. He hardly had the right to see that.

Alec spoke up, to the back of his head. "Why'd you tell me?" There was no challenge in his voice, no demand, but it was not all calm.

Magnus gentled his tone. "It occurred to me that I was asking a lot from you, and not even offering my own full motivations. You've helped me more than anyone so far, and asked no favors in return."

"You don't owe me anything." Alec shifted with a chafing of fabric. "I could help you, so I did. I mean, I still am, but you get the point."

"I wonder," Magnus said, "if you're this kind to every stranger that comes to your door."

Alec made a soft sound. "I figure it pays to be kind. You never know which of your visitors are angels in disguise. I just botched that quote."

A twinge of warm awe went through Magnus. He glanced up at Alec, and dared to crook his mouth in some semblance of a smile. "I think you used it exactly right."

"Okay." Alec averted himself in turn, like the shuttered look they shared had been too much. He tarried on the distance, then said, more firmly, "You should drink your tea. I don't like the look of those clouds."

Shaking himself out of the moment, Magnus gulped down the tepid tea. "What do you mean?"

The wind wailing above them was turning gusty, like a wild animal dragging on a hated leash. The shrub wavered and the low trees twisted. Puffs of loose dust blew up into thin plumes.

"It was gonna rain tonight, but now it might rain before nightfall." Alec stowed the thermos in his own backpack. "We can still make the peak. It's not much farther."

Over the blustering air, Magnus's ear caught another sound: a distant, stammering peal, like a broken clapper on the side of a bell.

"Do you hear that?"

Alec had craned his neck and was staring uphill with contracted, apprehensive focus. A boulder warped the line of the slope cast against the steel-pale sky, and Magnus thought something moved in its shadow: a quick whisking motion like swaying branches.

The pealing faded, faded, faded—and then sounded once more, full and resonant.

"Alec?"

Still no reply, as if Magnus's call had been stolen by the wind. Twigs crunched as Alec stepped across the hollow, leaving his things, striding empty-handed toward the point that pulled his gaze. His feet landed with economic agility. He'd climbed a good ten yards before Magnus started into motion of his own.

"Alec, what on earth?" He scrambled over the open slope, deplorably clumsier on it than Alec, who went soft and sure-footed. Trepidation parched Magnus's mouth.

 _I followed him to this place. This cold, lonely place where anything could happen._ Before this moment, not a shadow of a doubt had darkened his mind.

Quickening his pace, Magnus leaped across the stones. One rolled under his foot, but his weight was already on the next one, his attention on Alec. What was up there? A boulder, gray and unremarkable, like unnumbered others along this same rise.

He grasped Alec's wrist, the strip of bare skin between his fingerless glove and folded-up sleeve.

Alec swung to him, gasped hard, and Magnus felt tension ebb from him in beats, with each breath he drew.

"Magnus." It was, Magnus thought in a desultory way, the first time Alec had said his name. It sounded solid and grave on his lips, even though he spoke low. Magnus wanted to cling to the sound like to an anchor chain.

"I'm here. What happened?"

"There's something up there." Alec gestured with his free hand. "I saw... something. A shape."

Beside the boulder, something jutted out of the ground. Nature made no right angles, and so it was no branch or rock. Forming an unsteady but united front, they approached.

The corner of a rust-eaten metal frame lay tangled up in the moss and fine heather roots. A few bolts remained, fixing the two wide, flat bars together. The exposed part was at least three feet long, at a low angle to the ground, which had concealed it at a larger distance.

"Old steel," Alec said. "That's a big piece of whatever it is. The fuck is it doing here?"

"That, short and sweet, is the question." Scraping loose earth off the half-buried frame, Magnus met a different texture, raised letters stamped in the surface. "Get me the camera, please."

As Alec went back to their backpacks, Magnus found himself foiled by the rust covering the stamp. GV 1- ROB, went the letters unhelpfully. Trying to get out of his own light, as the hidden sun was behind him, he knocked his knee on something. Wispy, rotting fibers of what had been a rope were looped around a metal rod. It was encrusted with soil and green with oxidation, with a knob shaped like a teardrop at one end.

"What'd you find?" Alec leaned in over his shoulder.

Tugging his gloves on, Magnus hauled the entire object free. It was heavy, cast solid—some copper alloy, judging by the distinctive green of the discoloration. The other end had a round bracket, as if for hanging the rod from somewhere.

Once, in dire straits during his student years, Magnus had written an article on the historic church steeples of the North Isle. Diagrams had been involved.

"It's... a bell clapper." The wind was strong. Who knew how it twisted along these crags? It could have carried the sound of a bell from Saintshead, or even the next village. Numbly, Magnus took the camera from Alec.

"That's not from a small bell."

"Were there ever any structures here? A church? A—a watchtower?"

"I don't think so," said Alec. "The whole hill's rough to climb. I mean, it's called Sinner's Ledge because people used to climb here as penance. You know."

"Yes, indeed. Self-flagellation, mortification of the flesh, all that lovely stuff." Magnus was a tad relieved that the sarcasm flowed readily into his voice.

Alec huffed the driest laugh imaginable. "Bet they didn't bring tea and sandwiches."

Magnus worked very hard to ignore how that laugh spread into him, in a splash of bolstering warmth.

The film roll was almost full, but he used up the last half a dozen pictures on the artifacts, willing his hands to steadiness. Alec poked around the surrounding shrub some more, to no avail. Ragnor had a friend, Magnus seemed to recall, in some government agency for cultural heritage. Was it a civic duty to report the presence of age-old metal scrap in impossible places, on the off-chance that it was archaeologically significant?

He'd have to call Ragnor, who was, in any case, good with this kind of affair.

He'd have to get the shiver out of his spine that had gotten trapped there.

Alec's hand landed on his shoulder, cutting off his thought. He looked up.

The pallid disc of the sun had been blurred away by a roiling cloud bank over the sea. Below, fog rose from the valley like steam from a boiling pot, a slow milky swell that crept upward into the nooks and crannies of the slope. They stood high on the exposed hilltop, in the waning wind, watching the fog swallow their path back to the car.

"I'm hardly a weatherman," Magnus said, "but that doesn't look promising."

Alec had not released his grip. "No. It looks really bad."

In a rushing across the moss and dirt and stone, it began to rain.

 

*


	4. All the Secret Things

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to the Usual Suspect for finding all the places where this draft leaked and patching them up. ♥ ilu Ruth

 

Magnus drew his jacket hood up. Raindrops rustled against the fabric over his ears, dimming all other sound. The camera was still in his hands, unprotected. He scrambled back to where their things lay, and buried the camera under his extra clothes in the backpack.

In the meantime, Alec was scrounging for something along the trail. Hand-sized rocks, several of them, that he laid in a row on a waist-high stone, his gestures quick and efficient.

"I'm making a marker," he said. "There's been a rockslide up there. It probably exposed those metal parts, but you can't see 'em from the trail."

"That doesn't explain why they're up here in the first place."

"We'll have to worry about that later." Alec fastened the chest strap of his backpack. "There's a storm out there, and it's coming in hard."

Magnus had an inkling as to what that meant. You did not grow up in the archipelago and not come to respect the forces of nature to some degree. However, this wasn't a day of high winds in Kirkwall City that knocked out the electricity for a few hours. This was a storm front colliding with the warm air nestled along the coast, with nothing to temper the resulting roil of the elements.

He silenced the thought at the back of his mind that the weather had gone from inconvenient to foul just when they'd found the artifacts. Storms brewed quickly in summer.

"I take it you have a suggestion." Magnus tried and failed to pull the sliver of anxiety from his voice.

"You might not like it."

"I'm sure I'll prefer it to sitting here until the rain washes us down the slope." The tracks the rockslide had left were evident now that Alec had alerted him to them. The ground did not feel any stabler under his feet.

Rain speckled the waxed paper of the map as Alec opened it. "There's an old walker's hut to the north of the gorge where we came up. People don't use it much anymore, so it's not in great shape, but it's got a roof and a stove." Alec traced the route to a tiny house-shaped symbol, though Magnus was shaky on where on the map they were _now_.

"It sounds better than trying to find the car in that soup." Magnus gestured at the fog below, curling about the sparse trees and outcroppings of the rise.

If the fog reached them on the slope, it would be an invitation to disaster to press on. A misstep might plunge either of them into a lethal fall. Magnus watched Alec pile all this onto his mental scales.

"It's not an easy trip. We'll have to go fast." A muscle rippled in Alec's jaw as he looked down.

"Then we go fast," Magnus said. "You know this place. I'm in your hands."

Under his dripping hood, Alec nodded. His face stilled. "Stick close to me."

 

*

 

The rain came down harder by the minute. It found the seams of Magnus's jacket and began to soak through. Sweat broke along his scalp and back, but he matched Alec's measured, unrelenting pace. The wind had faded to fickle swirls, but it seemed to always find just the angle from which to drive the rain right in their faces.

They clambered over sandy soil and tough shrubs wherever they could. Bare rock, made slick by the water, slowed their progress to a frustrating, careful crawl. Alec stopped now and then to squint at their surroundings, until he zeroed in on some landmark. To Magnus, the world had become a wall of dark gray on one side and the depthless simmer of fog on the other. He caught his breath while Alec oriented himself. The rain continued falling.

By this dreamlike dead reckoning, they eventually came to a path.

Magnus blew a sigh of relief at the sight of its worn groove. As far as the rain let them see, the landscape looked less austere, the trees taller and less gnarled, so they weren't as high up anymore. That was all he could say with any certainty.

"The compass?" The muted timbre of Alec's voice made it a request. Maybe he didn't have the breath for more. "We need to go north."

Magnus held the compass in his palm and watched the needle twitch, as if it shared his confusion. With laboring slowness, it found its direction and held firm.

North was north, Magnus told himself. People could get muddled; instruments, as a rule, did not.

Alec, for all his apparent talent for orienteering, was still human.

"You're sure this is the right path?" Magnus said.

"Yeah. See those three rocks we passed? My old marker's on top of the one on the right."

"There's not a lot of company up in these heights, is there?" Magnus wiped sweat or rain from his eyes. As soon as he stood still, he felt the cold scratching at his skin. Soon enough it would turn into bone-gnawing shivers. "Any mischievous sorts that might move your markers?"

"Stop inviting trouble." Alec huffed, without venom. "This right here—it's already trouble up to our necks. We really don't need—oh, shit."

The way the compass showed north, the path made a serpentine upward switch, then ended in a section of slope that had been roughly swept away. Only a smooth, near-sheer layer of sand and thready roots sticking out from the sides remained.

Alec said, "Spring rains must've taken out the path."

Magnus swallowed. He was far less fussy than people tended to assume, but the reality of their situation clamped viselike around his calm, squeezing slowly down. Ghostly tendrils of mist were gathering around their ankles.

At the upper edge of their visibility, a cracked ledge of bedrock protruded above the broken path.

"Can we take a detour?" Magnus raised a finger to point.

Alec clearly did not relish the idea. "We have to. Any farther down and we'll be right in the fog."

They made their way up the ground that gave unsettlingly under their weight. Magnus could see that Alec's clothes, too, stuck to his body. His own boots squelched ominously.

"Let me go first." Taking the makeshift walking stick from Magnus, Alec edged onto the rocks. _You never send the navigator in first_ , Magnus wanted to say. _He's the only one that can get everyone home_.

Step by cautious step, Alec went across the ledge, and Magnus was struck again by the surety of his movements. Magnus had a cultivated dancer's grace, honed by a lifelong pastime, but Alec simply molded himself to the terrain.

Until he yelped, keeled wildly, and barely caught himself by lurching forward. His boot landed, half-miraculously, on a tuft of moss that hid a foothold. The walking stick tumbled from his grasp and down the slope, clattering as it went, but Alec worked himself onto firm ground on the other side. Magnus waited for his heart to descend back into its proper place.

"Everything all right?"

"Loose rock," Alec called back. "It's a bit of a jump. I'll help you."

"That's encouraging." Magnus put what self-irony he had left into his tone. This was getting further and further beyond the limits of his wilderness skills. If Alec was not here... and there Magnus cut himself off, squared his shoulders, and started up after Alec. What else could he do?

The ledge ran with rain, small streams rushing along the contours of the rocks. Magnus kept his eyes on his next foothold, and the next, and the next. He had no idea how much farther they had to go. His legs ached with the constant effort of keeping his balance.

"Here." Suddenly Alec was there, closer than he'd expected, his hand outstretched. "Don't step on the next one. Brace on me."

 _What were you, before you came here?_ The thought swam to Magnus like a fish in shallows, nothing but a glint of scales, a flitting suggestion. That life had, in any case, left Alec with nerves of steel and a heart of unlikely gentleness.

Magnus grasped Alec's hand, tensing to jump, and the rock under his back foot tipped sideways.

Vertigo sliced through him like a blade. Instinctively he threw himself forward, striving for the safety that his hammering thoughts knew was there. His fingers met something solid and clung to it with fear-spurred strength, even as he heard the dislodged chunk of the ledge roll down the slope.

There was a surface under his boot that held. He'd almost followed that tumbling rock down.

"Okay, okay," Alec was saying. "I've got you. Step forward. That's it, you're good."

Magnus rather crashed into the fact that he was in Alec's arms, Alec's forearm tight across his back, holding him up. He was clutching Alec's shoulder and a crumpled fistful of his jacket. Alec kept speaking, in the same chopped, calming rhythm, as he walked them both backward off the ledge.

"I'm—I'm sorry." Magnus pushed back from Alec, as politely he could with his heart still thumping. "I'm fine. All limbs attached. In no need of further rescue."

Alec dropped his hands. Magnus tried to quiet his brief, burning awareness of how close they'd stood, his weight pressed into Alec's lean frame, a promise of warmth under his sopping clothes.

"It's not far now," Alec said, a touch hoarse. "Come on."

 

*

 

Nestled in a depression in the hillside, the walker's hut was not much to look at: walls of rough-hewn stone, the shingles of the roof ragged and crooked. A woodshed and an outhouse made a suggestion of a yard behind it. A sheet of water slid down the wide eaves that provided a scant shelter above the door. Magnus leaned gratefully on the wall, in the space between the door and the single window.

He was drenched nearly to the skin. Alec looked much the same, though his jacket seemed actually waterproof, not just nominally impervious. Around them the daylight waned fast, the rain going from dull silver to black ink.

There was a clink and a rattle, and Alec pulled the window open with casual sangfroid. He folded up his pocket knife.

Magnus blinked. "I hadn't realized this would involve breaking and entering."

"All's fair in love and rainstorms? I just worked the window latch open. The frame's a bit loose." Alec made a strange sort of face, on the middle ground between humor and furtive hysteria. If Magnus was tired, how weary was Alec, after bringing them here on nothing but his memory of the route?

"If you told me the only way in was through the chimney, I'd manage the roof somehow."

"No need. Just give me a hand?"

Magnus folded his hands for a foothold and hoisted Alec up enough that he got a knee on the sill, shimmying into the hut feet first. He collided with some piece of furniture just inside and swore under his breath, then, after a dragging moment, opened the door for Magnus.

The interior was composed of a narrow entryway and a single room beyond. Magnus let his eyes adjust, and smudges of shadow resolved themselves into shapes. The air smelled stale and dusty, but whoever had last been here had left things in order. A weathered iron stove and a full firewood basket kept each other company on the far wall, and wide benches encircled the walls, for both sitting and sleeping purposes.

After a short but furious engagement with his shoelaces, Magnus went to the stove. The floorboards creaked under his steps. "Do you think we can light this without smoking ourselves out of here?"

"These are maintained." Alec rooted around in his backpack. "Taxpayer money. Technically, we're stealing from the government."

"Oh, victimless crimes." The stove hatch stained Magnus's fingers with soot, but the ashes had been duly emptied out. He piled firewood into the hearth, peeling off strips of bark to use as kindling.

The flare of a flashlight made him twitch and squint. Alec dropped the beam to the side.

"Sorry. How were you _seeing_ anything?"

"Fine, until you tried to blind me." Magnus chuckled to blunt the tips of his words. "Matches?"

Alec put a box of them in his hand. With patience he himself should have marveled at, Magnus lit the stove, and crouched there, feeding the flame with birch bark and letting the heat lift the chill from his skin.

"You got a change of clothes?" Alec's voice brought him back from the slight trance of tending the fire. "Better get out of those."

Magnus had hung his sodden jacket in the entryway, but otherwise he was still in his wet clothes. A dig through his backpack revealed that the rain had gotten to his spare shirt, although this sacrifice had preserved the camera. As he puzzled over this, his things spread on the bench, Alec flung a bundle at him from across the room. Magnus caught an armful of thin wool. It rasped finely against his fingers.

When he looked up, Alec was stringing his own clothes onto the rafters to dry. He'd rolled up the damp legs of his pants and found another of his solid-color tee-shirts, this one very likely black. Magnus spread out the gray sweater in his lap.

The gesture was obvious. The way Alec was trying to make it into _not a thing_ was both baffling and endearing.

Magnus still said, "Won't you be cold?"

"Just put it on," Alec said. "I'm fine, I run hot."

You could hear the pause bloom in the close air. Magnus stifled a sound, because it was not a sound suited for polite company, and he had to pretend that was what he and Alec were.

Polite company that had just survived a storm together. Alec was being practical, so Magnus could keep his rakish comebacks to himself.

Alec shifted. "Uh, at least that's what—forget it. There's no way I'm gonna come out of this sounding good."

"I am aflame with curiosity." As ever, Magnus found his best refuge in audacity—or in taking the joke and running with it. He plucked at his shirts. They clung clammily to his skin.

With a soft cough, Alec turned his back. In most circumstances, Magnus wouldn't have thought twice about stripping in the presence of another man, but maybe they raised them more bashful in the north. Allowing Alec to give him this courtesy, Magnus peeled off his damp clothes.

"You really want the story?" Alec said. "It's not much of a story."

"Keep talking." It was the gentlest prod Magnus could manage. "It'll keep us warm until the stove can."

"Right. When I was a kid, we—" Alec lifted the lid of a wooden chest behind the inner door "—we used to live in this old manor house. Drafty, creaky, cold all the time. Izzy would sneak into my bed to sleep, because apparently there was nowhere else she could get warm."

"That sounds to me like you were being a good brother."

"Better be. She kicks in her sleep. At least she liked being the big spoon, so I mostly got her knees in my kidneys."

Magnus concealed a laugh by pulling on the sweater, and folded the cuffs back so they rested over his wrists. He entertained a fleeting delusion of burying his face in the fine wool to see if smelled like Alec.

Then he buried the thought. They were both shivering and bordering on exhausted. With an efficiency that strongly implied he'd been here before, Alec unearthed a battered enamel kettle and a pile of undyed wool blankets. Magnus accepted one to bundle himself in while they waited for the room to heat up.

They'd be here overnight. They might as well get as comfortable as they could. Put together, their food supplies made a cold but fair evening meal. Alec braved the rain for another few minutes for the hand-pump well behind the hut, and Magnus made dubious tea with the icy clear water Alec brought in. The rain beat on the roof with the sound of a thousand tiny silver hammers.

They settled at the table by the window to drink the tea, Alec on the single chair and Magnus cross-legged at the end of the broad bench. Alec had hung the flashlight on a nail above the window, so it lit the table with its diffused glow. The storm and the mist obscured the rest of the world. Once the weather cleared, Magnus thought, they might step out the door and find themselves in the hinterland of some fairytale as easily as in their ordinary reality.

Whenever it got too quiet, he thought he heard the dying clamour of the bell under the rain.

Alec rose to feed the stove more wood. Magnus ventured, "Where was it? This manor house of yours?"

"Greenrood. I grew up there." That explained the accent. Greenrood, the erstwhile capital, lay at the other end of North Isle from Kirkwall City. The one time Magnus had visited, it had seemed to him a bleak, forbidding industrial hub, although it had a long and storied past.

"It was my grandparents' house." Sitting down, Alec tucked a foot up onto the chair. With his own blanket cloak and rain-ruffled hair, he looked a little comical, like a particularly kingly scarecrow. "From Dad's side. Grandfather was a career soldier. He's retired now, but nobody ever got it through to him that Idris hasn't been at war in a century. He wanted me to enlist. Then he wanted Jace to enlist. Would probably have told Izzy the same, if..."

Magnus wanted to prompt him, but held himself back. Compared to Alec's earlier terse remarks on his own history, this was like spring waters breaking through at thaw.

"Anyway. Dad works in military tech—close enough for Grandfather, I guess. Mom used to do politics, and now she's in publishing. She moved to Kirkwall to be closer to Jace and Izzy."

"Publishing?" Alec's story flowed into some fascinating channels, but Magnus chose the safest one. "Not that I'm looking to switch allegiances. I'm quite happy where I am." _If not, apparently, with what I'm doing for them._

"Ouroboros Press?" Alec offered. "She just started a couple years back."

"Oh," Magnus said. A small name, but one to watch out for. "I've heard promising things. They put out Helen Blackthorn's debut last winter, didn't they?"

"Yeah. I've never met her, but the book was great. Maia once told me off for reading it in the watch room, but—" Alec skidded to some mental stop. "I—I didn't think it was your kind of thing. The whole urban fantasy angle."

One by one, Magnus was taking these new nuggets of information and weighing them against what he knew of Alec. The shadow of severe familial expectations loomed behind him, contrasted against the sensibilities of a patent dreamer trying not to be one. Another little paradox designed to haunt Magnus, it seemed.

He tilted his mug contemplatively. "If I may ask, what makes you think I wouldn't appreciate Miss Blackthorn's modern fairytale?"

Alec tried valiantly to vanish inside his blanket. When that proved futile, he scowled down at his hands, as if they were somehow at fault.

"Apologies." Magnus softened his voice, remembering the small spat over literary tastes they'd had on the trail.

"No. That's fair." Alec mustered himself. "I checked out your books. At the library. They're all so... highbrow. That Kirkwall Times critic who Mom claims never likes anything, liked your latest, what was it—"

" _Kites Over Kirkwall_ ," Magnus finished for Alec, mostly because his tarry mind was busy grappling with the rest. Alec had done detective work. On him. It could be simple academic curiosity. About him.

Alec unknowingly came to his rescue. "Yeah, that one. 'An incisive study of post-war urbanity', something like that?"

Magnus had photocopied that review and tacked it to the wall in the kitchen. Of course he had. _At least you didn't frame it_ , Catarina had sighed, if fondly.

"Actually—" He felt the glimmer spark in his eye. "There is a story to that. Malcolm Fade is indeed impossible to please under normal circumstances. He's also extremely grouchy acquaintances with my friend Ragnor."

"Mm-hm." Alec leaned forward.

"So, Ragnor met Malcolm at some stuffy function at the university, and Malcolm, as is his wont, got to complaining about the dismal state of domestic literature in Idris. Ragnor, who's more wily than people give him credit for, said to him, there's this writer, Magnus Bane, who you may have heard about, and his new book just came out."

Magnus paused for effect, and also because his fatigue made the story seem funnier than it perhaps warranted. He'd only told it a hundred times—but not to Alec, whose mouth had curved into a slight smile.

"Malcolm had read my first, and he wasn't impressed. The protagonist was tiresome, the plot predictable, et cetera. But he is a bit of a betting man, so Ragnor told him, all right. I'll get you a reader's copy, and if you like it, you'll write a review. That pretty much means the front page of the culture section."

Alec's smile became a grin, bright even through the tired slant of his face. "At least he kept his word."

"Ragnor would never have let him hear the end of it." Magnus slouched onto his elbows. The air was growing tolerably warm under the stove's efforts. "That review got me a few hundred extra sales, at minimum."

"That's some kind of beautiful," Alec said, with an almost enthralled air. "Izzy would love that. I don't think she reads a lot anymore, but she loved anything with a clever twist. I used to read to her, when we were kids. Adventure stories, old fairytales, all that. She wasn't nearly as picky as..."

His eyes pinched shut, as if at a flare of light, and a quick snap of a shiver twisted through him. Magnus was halfway out of his seat, propelled by alarm, before Alec halted him with a gesture.

"Sorry," Alec said, incongruously. "Sorry, I didn't think."

Magnus stared at Alec, unhappily mesmerized by the play of some agony right beneath his apologies. All these disorderly strokes, dashed across their conversations, were starting to paint a picture.

"It's all right. You've done nothing to offend me. I can see something's upset you, but... you can go on, or we can change the topic."

Alec sighed, the kind of sigh that began deeper than the body, that tried to excise or cleanse something. "After today, I guess you have the right."

"Only if you want to give it to me." Magnus slid back onto the bench. Rain spattered against the window.

"It's not a new thing," Alec said, hushed but steady. "I had a little brother. Max. He died four years ago."

It sounded oddly rehearsed: the bare facts of a truth that could split you to the bone. It recast every cut-off comment Alec had stopped himself from finishing. It explained, to a rough degree, the apparent splintering of this family that Alec spoke of with such tangled love.

Alec had dug the nail of his thumb into the side of his other palm, in the soft fold between the thumb and forefinger. Magnus made no move to separate his grip, though the skin was taut under the dull edge of the nail. He only laid his own cold palm on top of Alec's hands. Rubbed faint circles with the tips of his fingers, until Alec slowly, slowly relaxed.

 _I understand_ , was the only thing Magnus could have said, and Alec already knew.

 

*

 

When Alec rose from the table, Magnus didn't stop him. He stoked the fire again, then stretched out on the bench, buried in two blankets, a third under his head. The bench was wide enough for two sedate sleepers who didn't mind close company for the sake of warmth. Magnus doubted whether he could fall asleep, no matter how tired he was.

"Don't let the fire go out." A yawn forced Alec to pause. "It'll get cold again really fast."

"I won't." Alec had advised Magnus on this point just about first thing after he'd lit the stove. "Get some sleep if you can."

"Workin' on it," Alec mumbled. "Good night?"

It made Magnus feel dangerously fond that Alec phrased it as a question. He wasn't sure he could trust his own instincts right now. Nothing about this situation was strictly _normal_ , even discounting the swift changes in the weather and the possible sensory hallucinations.

"Good night," he said. Alec turned to face the wall and sank away, slumping into sleep with enviable ease.

Magnus took the flashlight down and switched it off to conserve the battery. The rain turned the night into near pitch, but his eyes had always been sharp in the dark. He had the ends of too many threads in his fist, and little idea of where they would unspool.

This jaunt into the wilds had brought more questions than answers. That was fine as such; new questions might open new ways to get to those answers. But there was following threads, and then there was getting tangled up in them.

He had thought a decade would be enough time to view his own past with an impartial eye. To gather what facts he could on the death of someone he'd loved and make a reckoning.

He could never speak to George again. Could not fix what had shattered between them, because he'd been too proud for it while there'd still been time. Too hurt and too stubborn.

That was, he supposed, the price the living paid. They were left with their regret, while the dead were free.

Something flickered behind the window.

A misty flash, shown and shuttered. Again, and again, like the ordered pulses of a beacon. Magnus squinted, leaning closer to the glass. Surely nobody was looking for them _now_ , in pouring rain and darkness? Was someone else out in this godless weather?

They were on the wrong side of the hills for the lighthouse's beam to reach them. It was too cold for lightning. He heard no thunder.

No sound at all, beyond the rain on the roof.

He thought of shining the flashlight out the window, as a signal. Would the light carry through the fog? Perhaps more importantly, who or what might it attract?

Alec muttered in his sleep. His hand thumped on the bench as he fumbled about for something.

"Go away," he said, deep and slurred. "Go. Not for you." Even barely above a breath, it was an order. Or an insistent plea.

Alec's evident distress displaced Magnus's own. He went to the bench; his hand sought Alec's shoulder for a gentle shake. The last turn of their conversation could certainly have made a fertile bed for nightmares to sprout.

"It's not real," he whispered. "Just a dream. Just a dream."

Alec struck upon Magnus's hand with his own, squeezed down with only a fragment of intent. His breaths eased again. His fingers went slack and slipped away.

The window gaped utterly empty between the pale rectangles of the curtains.

With a sigh, Magnus tucked himself onto the bench next to Alec, drawing the blanket over his head. The idea of a catnap had barely formed when sleep came up, subtle and sudden, and stole him away.

 

*


	5. A Dream In Somebody's Head

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Much love to Ruth and Spoon for catching my foibles and failures. You are treasures, both of you.

 

Magnus woke to dawn outside the window and Alec's head against his shoulder. Alec was snoring faintly. He'd curled halfway onto his side, long limbs tucked close, still fast asleep. His hair smelled of smoke and sweat and wool. Magnus swept it away from Alec's cheek with cautious fingers, and told himself not to linger, no matter how warm Alec was.

As soon as he shoved back the blankets, he gasped at the chill that seized at him. The stove had gone cold—he'd slept through the night, instead of the ten winks he'd hoped for. The window opened to a crisp, damp morning, the moss and grass of the shallow glen outside jewel-bright in the sun.

In a fit of solicitude, and to limber his stiffened muscles, Magnus lit the stove, then filled the steel bucket with water and made tea with the last of his tea bags. At least they could warm themselves before they left.

Back to the car. Back to Saintshead, back among people and houses and lights that stayed in their lamps instead of wandering up hill and dale and bemusing wayward hikers. He glowered at the radiant daybreak as if it were a ruse, a mirage barely covering whatever sinister secrets the landscape held. Last night was still a press of bitter dread in his throat.

Alec stirred at the hissing of the kettle and stretched like a young lion, his arms arching above his tousled head. He took a mug of tea from Magnus with a sleep-hoarse, "Thank you."

 _I should be thanking you_ , Magnus thought. _You most likely saved our lives_.

A silent understanding of some kind had settled between them, fine-spun and strange. They traded only a few words as they tidied the room, packed their things, and set off.

It was more than lingering exhaustion that kept them quiet, Magnus surmised. They'd come through danger together. They'd shared secrets and broken bread both literally and proverbially.

Aided by Alec's map, they descended along a narrow path, the dregs of the night-chill shivering on their skin until the exertion warmed them. The path led them down the slope at a twisting clip, then merged into the marked hiking trail that curled along the hem of the hills to the village. Even on scant sleep and too-empty stomachs, they made good time. As the sun rose higher, it mellowed the air, made it soft and sweet to breathe.

They went around a fallow field and finally climbed onto the same dirt road they'd driven to the turnaround. The hills loomed in the western sky, their muted greens and grays turned to cloudy gold by the late-morning light.

"Half a mile now," Alec said, the first thing he'd said in two hours. "We should see the car any minute."

Magnus's watch told him the time was fifteen minutes to ten. An ordinary time under an ordinary sky on a Monday. Alec knew these hills like the back of his hand, but had he heard the sound of the bell? Seen the strange light?

Magnus opened his mouth to try and ask, when a bicycle swung into view through the vegetation.

"Alec!"

The next thing Magnus knew, Maia had braked harshly across the dirt and dropped her bicycle in some fireweeds. She was in jeans cut raggedly into shorts and a band tee-shirt, and a scowl caught between temper and relief tugged at her brows. "What the hell happened to you? I've never seen fog come in so fast, I couldn't leave the watch room all night."

"Hey, hey, it's all good." Alec moved into her path like he meant to intercept her, then halted short of touching her. "I'm sorry. I didn't think the weather was gonna get that bad."

"You just had to try your luck." She deflated a fraction. "I called Luke and Clary, and Mrs. Vera down the road, and even the Lewises, and nobody had seen you. Don't try any comebacks about me playing in the tide pools. At least if I drowned, you'd find me fast."

Alec gave a throaty sound closer to mirth than horror, so Magnus didn't comment. Lightkeeper humor probably ran to the gallows kind. Alec put a hand on her shoulder, stroking his thumb over her shirt. She made a face with an obvious tint of _what am I going to do with you_.

"I assure you we're both fine," Magnus said. "A little worse for wear, but intact."

"Hi, Magnus." Maia had gone straight to addressing him by first name. "Not that I mind you stealing Alec for your mysterious errands, but maybe bring him back by midnight next time?"

"I'm afraid my enchanted carriage lost a wheel on your rocky trails." Magnus shrugged past Alec's muffled " _hey_!". "And midnight took us by surprise."

"If you make me Cinderella in this scenario, we're gonna have words." Alec went to gather Maia's bicycle with sudden industry.

" _I_ should make you wash the lens by yourself for scaring me like that." Maia wiped sweat from her cheek. With the rainclouds dispersed, the day promised to grow into a sultry one.

"I'll cook on Friday?" Alec sounded almost plaintive. This was evidently a domestic tradition, since he and Maia fell into a debate over what the meal should entail. Alec kept walking her bicycle, and Magnus tagged along a couple of steps behind them. Though he wasn't part of it, their mellow squabbling eased him into a sense of normalcy.

He and Alec had an adventure up in the hills. It was over now, and civilization—such as it was—beckoned again. As promised, the car soon emerged from the brush and grass.

"Fish." Alec hoisted the bicycle onto the clunky-looking rack on the car. "Don't you ever get sick of it?"

"Not all of us dream of living only on bacon burgers with a side of moping," Maia countered.

"Hey, I resent that."

"Personally," Magnus cut in, "I could live on ocean fish most days. It's one of the better things you have here."

" _You_ should come to dinner." Maia flashed a smile, light and quick across her face. "I'd have an appreciative audience for once."

Magnus wasn't sure when the party doing the cooking had been switched, but he could work with that. "With pleasure. If Alec doesn't mind, of course. It sounds cozy."

"Um, no." Alec nearly buried his face in his backpack searching for the car keys. "Sure, why not? Three's not much more trouble than two."

"That's such a warm, welcoming way to put it," Magnus quipped. It was hard not to be swept up in their gentle jostling of each other.

Alec opened his mouth, then closed it and sighed meaningfully instead.

"Perfect." Maia unlocked the driver-side door with her own set of keys. "I'll drive. You've got all the spatial awareness of a fence post right now."

Resisting the urge to pat Alec on the head as he went past, Magnus graciously took the back seat. Alec slumped into his seat next to Maia, as if finally letting himself unwind.

 

*

 

Magnus rather lost the next few days to a steep post-excitement drop. His mind swirled with thoughts that grabbed him and let go before he could finish them. After he'd slept away the sheer physical strain, sleep turned fickle as a summer lover playing hard to get.

His dreams, when they deigned to come, were girded in mist and darkness. He followed a capricious light along paths that dwindled into nothing under his feet. The sea surged below, and opened to swallow him as he fell. The last thing he saw was a shadow, like the movement of wings, before the icy water took him.

Old nightmares in new variations. That was all they were.

He needed something solid and concrete. Facts, not intimations that might have been only a trick of his own mind. At the same time, he hardly seemed able to focus on anything. Clary brought him a heap of reading—more and less relevant—from the book bus, and he barely cracked the first volume. He packed for his planned trip to Briarwood, then missed the bus by waffling too long over his morning coffee. The undeveloped film roll sat on top of the chest of drawers in his bedroom, next to Alec's compass and sweater, which he had at least aired thoroughly and folded tidily.

His three calls to Ragnor went to the answering machine. That meant they were lost to the void, since Ragnor would listen to the messages about once a year. How he'd ever made senior lecturer with such communication skills was a complete enigma, really. Magnus would have to sic Catarina on him, and that was trouble of its own, with her packed schedule.

The daily life of Three Arrows Farm rolled along. Clary tended the horses and weeded the rows of ripening strawberries. Luke woke too early for Magnus to encounter at breakfast anymore, and apparently crept to bed at midnight, occupied by the animals and the small fields in turn. Atypically for himself, Magnus skirted around the other guests, withdrawing to the cool attic as the heat climbed notch by notch.

He had Cleophas's cipher. He had the last quarter of the moon. The code-named bird that probably was not a bird at all, but something else entirely. A part of him wanted to simply climb back up the hill and turn over every stone on Sinner's Ledge until it gave up its mysteries.

Who would put a bell on a godforsaken hilltop, miles from roads and houses, with no people to hear it knell?

Cleophas Graymark had been on to something, and then she had—vanished. Left, Magnus had assumed. Luke spoke of her like a thing of the past, but it was an end _he_ had tied off by his own choice.

Midway through the week, Magnus was pottering about in the kitchen, having accidentally slept past breakfast, when there were voices from the yard. Luke's gravely tones, and a woman's voice, thin with age.

"Fog last night over the sea," she said. "I don't much like it. It makes my feet restless."

"You'd better shut your door tight," Luke said, "and eat your strawberries."

She laughed, a merry cackle that jolted Magnus's memory. He should've moved away from the open window. The muslin curtain hid his silhouette from outside.

"You make light. Your sister never did, I'll say that much for her. She listened to me."

"That makes you the only one in the world, Mrs. Vera." Luke sighed. "I know what Cleo was like, how hard she was, and I lived with it for years. If it wasn't for Clary, I'd pack up the car and leave."

The old woman made a sympathetic sound. "You're in a dark mood today, if you're thinking like that. She loves this land, and so do you. So did your sister. But it's not a kind place to give your heart to."

Magnus was quite certain now that this Mrs. Vera was the elderly lady he'd met in the village and managed to offend with his questions about the shipwreck. The way she spoke to Luke was warm with long familiarity, though.

"No," Luke said, "it's not." He paused. "You have a good day now."

Something knocked its way through the mild lethargy that had surrounded Magnus since the hike. Lowering his mug into the sink so it made nary a tap, he fled upstairs as stealthily as he could. He snatched up his backpack, gave himself a cursory once-over in the bathroom mirror, and went out via the back porch.

 

*

 

It was only when Magnus slid off his bicycle on the last rise below the light station that he stopped to think. There was still an invisible spur digging itself into his back.

_She heard the island._

_Not a kind place to give your heart to._

He needed to study the rest of Cleophas's journals.

The moment he needed to talk to Luke was also coming up fast, and it might not be a nice conversation. He had ventured a question on the _Blackbird_ to Luke in the first days. Luke had shrugged, ponderous, and said he knew nothing he hadn't read in the papers.

Magnus had taken him at his word. There had to be something _else_ he knew, something that colored every meeting Magnus had had with the people of Saintshead, that shaded the everyday course of their lives.

Magnus had enough of an investigator's spirit to know he should pursue this angle. Still, it meant he was treading close to potentially painful family business. He was also dangerously close to liking Luke too much to go behind his back without remorse.

He set his bicycle in the rack on the office side of the yard. Maia was crouched in the vegetable patch, smudged with dirt and serenely humming something that sounded like Jem and the Silent Brothers to Magnus's ear. They'd have to bond over music tastes later. As soon as she spotted him, she gestured to the shore with a fistful of common dandelions. "He's at the boathouse. Watch your step when you go down."

"One day, we must have a conversation that's not about Alec's whereabouts."

"You're coming to dinner tomorrow, right?" She frowned at something in the damp black earth, where salad leaves were unfurling, crinkled and hopeful. "I kinda wanted to interrogate you a little—okay, that's weird."

"What is?"

"Oh, nothing." She scraped at the bed with her garden trowel. "The salad is seriously lacking motivation this year."

Magnus accepted her dodge. Something peculiar seemed to be in the air today.

The stairs that slanted down the cliff to the dock were the greenish hue of impregnated wood, bleached by salt and bird droppings. They swayed under Magnus's first vigorous steps, so he eased his pace. The boathouse itself shone a bold red, no doubt by grace of Alec's painting efforts. Lacy whitecaps threaded across the water that reflected the veil of cloud above. A handful of seagulls circled and cawed some way off the shore; now and then, one plunged down after fish that fed at the surface of the sea.

On the right side of the boathouse, a plank walkway ran along the wall. Alec sat at the end of it, dangling his feet over the waves, his gaze on the distance.

It was the first time Magnus had seen him so idle. He seemed to always have a task or a duty to get to, some purpose to fill.

Magnus did not stop to contemplate him. Not for more than twenty seconds, anyway, because at that point Alec turned his head his way. "Hey."

With a glance to make sure the walkway was mostly clean, Magnus sat down on Alec's left. He could've asked his question standing up, but something about the moment entreated him to linger. He left a few careful inches of space between them and tried to suppress the keen sense memory of how Alec's head had pressed into his shoulder while he slept. It had happened by chance, not design. Reading into it was pointless.

So he retreated onto established ground. "I was thinking about Cleophas Graymark."

"Oh. You want me to get the journals for you? I guess we didn't learn much on the hike."

"Just because we don't know how it fits doesn't mean it's not a piece of the puzzle. Let's keep an open mind."

Alec hummed a laugh of sorts. "Didn't take you for an optimist."

"You wound me." Magnus let a drop of melodrama into his tone. "Do you imagine I'd be here if I didn't believe in the improbable?"

"I don't know," Alec said, like that was his honest answer. Knowing him even as little as Magnus did, it probably was. Alec's eyes strayed to the shimmering horizon. "Do you? Believe in it?"

 _More today than when I arrived._ "I'm starting to realize the thing I came looking for is tangled up in quite a bit more than just the fate of one ship."

"Can I ask you something? I mean, another thing." Once Magnus nodded, Alec went on, "Is this just personal for you? Like wanting closure. I'm not saying nine years is too long to mourn, it takes as long as it takes, but..."

"I could have lived a whole life in that time?"

"I didn't say that." Alec touched the back of his neck, under the the sweat-curled tips of his hair.

"It's okay." Magnus's mouth drew into a half-smile. "I would say I've lived since then. Gotten a degree, worked too much, made a career for myself. Made new friends and cherished old ones. Enjoyed myself, even."

Reduced to such simple terms, the last decade of his life sounded rather ordinary. There had been good things: bold opportunities, bright parties, travel and toil and triumph. The enduring love of the family he'd carved out for himself, when the one he'd been born into had been a miserable mockery of itself.

Alec's chin dipped. "I guess I get it and I don't. I don't know how it feels to lose somebody you—somebody that's not family. I've never really—"

Magnus resisted filling the pause, but when Alec seemed to wobble on the edge, not tilting this way or that, he took a chance. "Been in love?"

"Yeah." Alec made an unidentifiable noise. "Not that there's been a lot of opportunity."

It was hardly an apt moment for such a comment, and yet Magnus said, "I'm sorry, have you _met_ you?"

Alec appeared to briefly swallow his tongue, and then something defiant crept into his face. "Uh, how did we get from your investigation to my love life?"

"I'm just saying." Magnus made his expression as kind as he could, though he couldn't smother the glimmer in his eye. "I have it on good authority that you have attractive qualities in abundance. Honest, steadfast, not too bad to look at, handy in a crisis..."

"Perks of the job. Look. I just haven't—I had a short thing or two in pilot training, not that it's any of your business."

"None whatsoever." Magnus spread his hands with a false lightness of motion. He could not claim in good faith that his queries were wholly innocent. "I didn't want to offend."

Kneading a thumb against his brow, Alec let tension slough from his shoulders. "I know. You're just doing your thing. That twisty wordplay you do. And I've been sitting here thinking about things I shouldn't."

The protective levity bled slowly from Magnus. He watched Alec's face, the delicate scar that bisected his left eyebrow, and realized for the first time that a similar scar went down Alec's neck, larger but well healed, shaped like a jagged letter z. He'd gotten just enough sun for the paler tissue to show against the tan.

The surgeon had most likely done an outstanding job, but whatever injury had left those scars, it had raked the side of his head open.

"I'm not offended," Alec said, low, measured. Like he'd made a decision. "There's a lot to it. I'd just passed my final tests when my brother died. I got my pilot licence, but Max, it—it changed everything. I couldn't stay at home. Izzy was still living with my parents, and she pretty much ran from them to Kirkwall, slept on Jace's couch until she could take her entrance exams." His hand was pressed to his leg, the fingers flat and taut. "I—I had to go somewhere else. I asked for a discharge on health grounds. That's a polite way to say I was too fucked up to fly recon planes anymore."

Magnus was starting to understand that with Alec, there were lines in the ground. Once you were allowed to step over each line in turn, you were also allowed these rattling, candid admissions, whether you were braced for them or not.

 _Discharge. Reconnaissance_. Alec had military training, then, in one of the most demanding roles in the defence forces. That went a ways toward explaining his slightly uncanny skill set, as well as the quiet discipline hammered deep into him.

_Another brave soldier, is it then, Bane? Are you developing a type?_

Mostly as a distraction from his own traitorous thoughts, Magnus said, "That's why Saintshead. It was somewhere else."

The wind picked up, thrumming through their clothes, tossing translucent spray up perilously close to their shoes. As it tugged apart the haze covering the sun, long columns of light broke through like a volley of arrows frozen in flight.

"There was a lightkeeper post nobody seemed to want, so they took me on." Alec cocked his head, a bit dismissive. "Turned out I was pretty good at it, so I stayed. Not that many chances for dating, though."

"All right, all right." Alec did not sound distraught by his lack of romantic prospects. Magnus could—though perhaps he should not—examine that later. They'd veered wide of the topic he'd wanted to raise. "The journals. Are there any other personal effects? Anything that could help with her cipher?"

He could have sworn Alec seemed relieved at the change of subject. "I went through the lighthouse logs from the period around the shipwreck. They're short and professional. Nothing weird there. I guess Cleophas kept it to her private records, but there _is_ a box with some books in it. One had her name inside the cover."

"That's a start." Then Magnus unfolded another concern that had begun to gnaw at him. The words dragged, but he pushed them out. "Alec. You know you don't have to keep playing my research partner, right? What happened up on the hill—it's a lot to ask, after that."

Alec got to his feet. His voice rasped slightly. "Do you want me to stop helping you?"

Magnus wished he could still see Alec's face; something in his tone cut him to the quick.

"No. It's only that this is getting a little more hazardous than I was picturing." Magnus had no idea how to verbalize the next part: _Something very strange is going in this place, and I don't know how to tell you that I'm sensing things that aren't there, because you're a rational person._ As well as someone who'd survived a horrible, life-rending tragedy and now seemed to have found a measure of stability again.

The waves rocked the craft in the boathouse, a stuttering symphony of creaking ropes and fiberglass scraping the dock. The gull flock had drifted farther away, their cries fading into the twists of the shoreline.

Alec said, steel threaded through his tone, "How's this? If I want out, I'll let you know. Until then, you can count on me."

He offered his hand, palm up. Without looking up, Magnus grasped it and let Alec help him to his feet.

That was another thing he knew now: how Alec's gentle, work-hardened hand felt around his own. How easily Alec extended it. The solid strength of his fingers, like you could brace the world in his palm.

"Very well." Magnus exhaled. "Shall we see about these books?"

 

*

 

Alec left Magnus and the box, the cardboard so worn it flaked under his fingers, in the front yard. Maia had moved on to watering the potted herbs set along the south wall of the house, and Alec went to join her.

Magnus sat down at the garden table under the black rowan. He noted with amusement that someone had tied a braid made of cheap satin ribbons on a branch. Either it'd been a joke, or else a visitor of superstitious bent had entreated the tree for something.

The box contained mostly books: trite-looking crime novels, a national classic or two, a dose of nonfiction. Some had been pored over repeatedly, their spines bent soft, while a couple still had a price sticker that had congealed to the back cover. Magnus summoned his grit, which had been away without leave all week, and got to work.

Even through the layered leaves of the black rowan, the day did its best to slowly cook him where he sat. He went over book after book, looking for underlinings, margin notes, loose papers. A few of them contained Cleophas's name, but nothing substantial turned up. Alec brought him a glass of water with ice and some dry commiseration, then slipped away.

A few tourists wandered by—the lighthouse was something of a local attraction, even outside tour days. Magnus did his best to look like part of the garden furniture. Swallows soused above the shed, where they'd built their nests under the eaves. Maia swore, loud and inventive, at something in the office, then put her head out the window to mouth _sorry_ at Magnus. He waved his hand, _don't worry about it_ , chuckling.

He reached for a slim, illustrated botany volume. The paper had gone brittle and yellow, and the book fell open to an earmarked page. A sheet of paper slithered free, weighed down by a ragged, stitch-embroidered ribbon taped to it.

It was a drawing: murky and sketchy, in smudged charcoal, showing a rough human figure in a wide-brimmed hat and a greatcoat or mantle, swept out to the side. In its left hand, the figure held a burning storm lantern.

Magnus felt foreboding like a noose around his throat. He lifted the ribbon; the old tape came off without resistance.

Under it was written in pencil: _Cloud, raven, star. Three loops._

Chills skittered over his skin. The lantern shed a petrified suggestion of light across the page, and yet he couldn't stop imagining that it was winking, a gelid, pulsing glint through rain.

Alec and Maia were in the yard behind the office, their voices carrying over to Magnus. Alec had strongly implied Maia was a worthy confidant, and she had at least a general sense of Magnus's investigation. He debated with himself only for a second before going up to them.

Someone had dug a staggering ditch across the lawn and the garden path. Stretches of smooth root, about as wide as his forefinger, peeked out from the shovel marks. In the middle of this upheaval stood Maia, leaning on a shovel, and Alec, gesturing to underscore some argument.

"They're everywhere," Maia said. "There's seedlings behind the shed, and the rhubarb is kinda dying. That big root goes right under the vegetable patch, it's sucking everything dry."

"It's a young tree." Alec folded his arms. "That doesn't make sense."

"It's _one_ tree, is my point. The root system shouldn't even grow this big."

"I see I missed some excitement," Magnus said. "Trouble in the garden?"

"The house-tree's gone wild." Maia poked a forefinger at the air in the general direction of the black rowan. "It's put out roots all over. My marine biology dreams never prepared me for this, it's all horticulture to me."

"I'll see about pulling the seedlings," Alec said. "It seriously looks like it's trying to take over the whole yard."

"The black rowan?" Magnus felt a frown come on. "Do you know how old that tree is?"

Maia considered. "Ten, twelve years. Not much older."

That sealed it. Magnus quelled the urge to wrap his arms around himself. "I'm even less of a botanist than you, but if that's at all correct, then that tree was planted by a particular predecessor of yours."

"Cleophas." Alec sharpened. "Did you find something?"

Magnus opened the book to show them the drawing and the ribbon. Maia peered at them past Alec's arm as he, too, leaned in to look. "The drawing's not signed, but the handwriting matches her journals."

Alec pressed his mouth thin. His throat worked as he took in the lines of the sketch.

Maia picked up the ribbon between the pads of two fingers. "It looks like one of those charms? The kind they used to tie on trees in, you know, olden times."

"Yeah," Alec said, abrupt, at volume. "It does look like that."

"More delightful local customs?"

"It's mostly a Rosewell area thing," Maia said. "There's these symbols you see in folk art. They used to have real religious meaning, but most people probably figure they look nice and rustic."

"Cloud, raven, star." Alec indicated each finely sewn shape: a spiral curling outward, made hazy by cross-stitches to either side of the main line; the silhouette of a bird; a nine-pointed star. The pattern repeated over the whole length of linen.

 _Cloud raven_. Not a bird. A charm. For what purpose? Had Cleophas simply been consumed by the same knotted-up superstitions that seemed to plague the villagers at large?

More importantly, how did all this slot together, if it did? _Keep an open mind. That's the key. There has to be an explanation._

"So you would tie this to the house-tree," Magnus said. "Such as your runaway rowan."

"Yeah, if this was the previous century." Maia's expression showed her skepticism as clearly as her tone. "And if evil sea spirits were an actual concern."

Alec blew out a sharp sigh. "I'm gonna ask if Luke can come over and help us cut it down."

Magnus could not shake the unpleasant feeling that cinched his throat tight. There was absolutely no call for him to meddle in Alec and Maia's affairs, bizarre turns of yard work included.

"Are you sure?" he still said, tactfully mild. "It's a beautiful tree. Couldn't you just cut back the root system?" If that was feasible. The thought of felling the rowan nettled him for a reason he couldn't quite name.

The look on Alec's face implied that he might have agreed with the cautions of Magnus's inner voice. "It's pretty. It's also starving everything in a forty-yard radius."

"You know what," Maia put in, and it rather sounded like a diplomatic intervention, "let's ask Luke before we make any drastic landscaping decisions. He actually knows how trees work."

Magnus took the opening. "I should make my way back. It's past four. I'll leave the books—"

"Just put 'em on the office porch," Alec said, too brusque, then tried to smooth over his own agitation. "We'll see you tomorrow, right? Dinner is at five, since I have to be on duty by eight."

"You will. May I still bring a bottle of wine?" Magnus tucked the sketch and the ribbon into the book and the book under his arm.

When Alec met his eye, it felt to Magnus it was the first time Alec really saw him during this conversation. "Something that goes with, what was it, plaice? Maia's got designs."

"Designs even you can't say no to, Lightwood." Maia hefted the shovel. "Now, I've got some holes to fill."

"I'd better go help," Alec said to Magnus, a tiny, wry smile curving his lip. "Tomorrow?"

Magnus didn't point out Alec was repeating himself. The undercurrent of anxiety leached from his bearing, and Magnus's mood lightened with it. "Tomorrow."

 

*

 

Late that evening, against all odds, Ragnor returned Magnus's call. After their usual opening volley of amicable insults, this call continued so:

"I'm a senior lecturer of political history, Magnus, _not_ the history of places that you'd mistake for a fly sneezing on a map. I'd be surprised to find a single mention of it in all the books of my department. How are you doing over there, you old menace?"

They were three years apart in age, but Ragnor had never managed to sound a day under fifty in all the time Magnus had known him.

"Perfectly fine," Magnus said, cross-legged on the hall rug, half-whispering in the dark. It was half past ten. The house hummed with silence around him.

"You're retracing the last steps of your scorned paramour—the last one you ever had, mind, that's how well you took his death—and you're _perfectly fine._ Pull the other one, it's got bells on."

A two-pronged attack, was it now? Magnus had heard this refrain before. "Now of all times, you've been listening to Cat."

"She has a vexing talent for being right," Magnus heard Ragnor tap a pencil on his desk, a sure sign of gears turning in his mind. "As for your questions, fax me what you have. I'm going to the National Archive next week, I can have a look."

"You presume I can find a communication system more modern than a carrier pigeon in this darling backwater." The gibe tasted flat to him all of a sudden. "It's not bad. I've had adventures. Been invited to dinner. I have nothing to wear, not that you can appreciate that. Do you have any idea what kind of wine pairs well with plaice?"

"Riesling," Ragnor sighed, as if Magnus were stuck on a detail of no consequence. He'd have thought of a proper wine in a minute. It had been a disquieting day. "Do wear clothes, to begin with, and spare me the details."

Magnus laughed against his palm, aware that Clary was going to sleep in her bedroom next to the kitchen. "Thank you, old friend."

Once he'd hung up, he took himself to bed with a sense of resolution. Whatever was rotten in Saintshead, he could take tomorrow to meet Alec and Maia for dinner. A friendly, ordinary meal. They'd earned that.

 

*

 

The door to Alec's side of the house had been propped open with a brick. The first thing Magnus heard, knocking on the doorframe, was Maia hissing, "Take it out, take it _out_!" Metal clanged and Alec blurted out something not fit to be printed, and then the smell of something baked to redolent sweetness wafted into the room.

"Hello?" Magnus called, pulling off his jacket. The day was on the cooler side and the wind brisk. Alec's room looked much the same as before, but the round table had been set for three. A vase full of meadow flowers crowned the picture, and the door leading to Maia's side was ajar.

His hosts turned up in near unison. Maia sported a yellow, sleeveless silk top and a hip-hugging skirt; Magnus thought this was the piece missing from when he'd first met her, a bold, off-beat style that suited her vivid edge in a way the keeper uniform never could. 

Beside her, Alec was more reserved but no less arresting. His gray button-up did such justice to his arms that Magnus bit the inside of his cheek, and the popped collar showed the hollow of his throat, soft and tempting. Magnus wanted to stroke a finger across it. Then, maybe, put his mouth there and make Alec's breath hitch.

Outside his rogue imagination, to a conventional eye, the two of them would've made a glossy young couple straight out of a home decor magazine. Magnus was sure neither Maia nor Alec fit the description. In a deep, dark recess of his mind, he was glad they didn't.

Friendly dinner. Right.

"You look very dapper," he said, safe in the ambiguity of that _you_. "Now I'm glad I dressed for the occasion."

"Thank you," said Maia, "so do you. Come in. Shockingly, we didn't burn the dessert. The oven is a piece of crap."

"At least you have one, Roberts." Alec accepted the proffered wine from Magnus, and for a second his eyes clung to Magnus, sliding intently across the silk scarf knotted at his throat, the delicate ear cuff he'd barely worn lately, the breadth of his shoulders, brought out by the fitted linen shirt. Or so Magnus let himself think. At this rate, his cheek would be raw by the time the evening was through.

"Shut up, _Alexander_ ," Maia shot back at Alec, like this was the secret weapon she reserved for truly heinous cases of him getting on her nerves. "You have colors on your TV, unlike some of us."

"'Alexander'?" Magnus was startled into delight. "You have a name like that and you cut it short?"

"It's kind of a mouthful." Alec glanced at the label of the wine bottle. "This is good stuff. I mean, thank you, but you didn't have to."

"Please." Magnus made a flick of the wrist that had knocked out lesser men. "It's only the best I could find here. That's hardly too much."

"Then it might even be worthy of the main course." Maia gestured to the table. "On that note, shall we?"

Magnus dug up his reserves of affable poise, smiled at her, and took a seat.

Maia had done something magical to the fish that involved basil and parmesan. Magnus told her so, in profuse turns of phrase. While he'd never fancied himself a great friend of the common potato, the cold potato salad was also a treat, smothered in mint and parsley and toasted seeds.

"Is there _avocado_ in this?" he found himself asking, around a forkful of said salad, barely civilized. He had certainly not seen one since coming to Saintshead. Even in Kirkwall, they were a mildly exotic sight.

"Maia has connections," Alec said, dry as sun-baked rock.

"Oh yeah." She tipped her empty wine glass significantly. Alec, tending the bottle, obliged her. "My personal fruit smuggler."

Upon further pokes, this was revealed to be a friend in Rosewell whose grandfather dabbled in greenhouse gardening. Maia was the most local of them, and vague on the details of her arrival to Saintshead, but she was saving up for a master's degree in marine biology. She edified them with details of porpoise behavior and the fascinating signs of intelligence in octopuses—Alec looked like he'd heard most of it before, but was happy to listen again.

They let the chatter meander where it would: music, current events, light slices of personal histories. Magnus skipped his investigation and all its current twists, and Alec seemed to take a cue from him.

Maia was, indeed, also a fan of Jem and the Silent Brothers. She and Magnus argued for a good ten minutes over the merits of their debut, _City of Bones_ , versus those of the latest album, _The Mortal Mirror_.

" _Mirror_ is way too dream pop for me." The dialogue did not deter Maia from cutting the rhubarb pie, which, to Magnus's slight surprise, was Alec's handiwork. " _Bones_ , that's a formative influence. I loved the early experimental shit they used to do."

"Formative, is it? I can hardly argue with that." Magnus laughed. The conversation served him a reminder, now and then, that he was almost a decade older than either of them. Alec had been confirmed to turn twenty-five this summer, and Maia was a year younger. "You'd probably think all of mine hopelessly obsolete."

"Maybe. You wanna share?" Maia pointed this to Alec, who wasn't quite silent, but would drop a remark or a story of a few words in between their more animated conversation.

"Share what? Embarrassing outtakes from my teen years?"

"Youth is the cornerstone of the self," Magnus said, as exaggeratedly pompous as he could, and then softer, "They don't have to be embarrassing, no? Everyone has, well, something that shaped them as a person. I am a little curious. And this pie is marvelous."

It was. They sighed collectively over that fact. Alec declined further glasses of wine beyond the first, so Maia and Magnus were gradually working through the rest of the bottle.

"Okay," Alec said. "Just, smart comments to a minimum."

"Naturally." Magnus gave him an earnest look, and Maia nodded on Magnus's other side.

Alec went to the bookshelf and slapped down two well-worn paperbacks between their strewn plates.

Through the mist of good food and his third glass of wine, Magnus sat up too straight.

"These books." Alec tapped his fingers on the cover of _Tides of Fortune_ , which Magnus clearly remembered titling in a midnight panic before the day he had to mail the manuscript. The cover curled outward with too much reading. "They're just typical Age of Sail adventure stuff. I read them like twice a year between seventeen and nineteen. They... gave me something. A window out of my life, I guess."

"Doesn't the second one end on a cliffhanger?" Maia turned the copy of _Guns at Dawn_ over. "Gretel was really mad about that. She got so into the romance. The navy lieutenant and the pirate captain, something like that."

"It does!" Alec said, with uncommon emphasis. "There was never a third, and Grant is a pseudonym. Nobody really knows who they are. I used to wonder what happened to them."

 _He needed to write a book that'd let him prove something to his father_ , Magnus answered, voiceless. _He fell in love with a mariner and lost him twice over, and couldn't love the high seas anymore._

He downed the rest of his glass in one sharp swallow. It was a disservice to the wine, but he had other problems here. The problem where Alec not only had read his youthful forays into popular literature, but _cherished_ them. The problem where Magnus could break this whole moment with one wrong word.

Quite without meaning to, Alec saved him. "The publisher went under, too, so we'll never know. But these were my thing." He actually lowered his voice to a theatrical note. "'The night was dark as the heart of a pirate.' It's kinda bad, but—"

"I don't know," Magnus managed. "There's a certain swagger to it. You know what you're in for, right from page one."

"'Lieutenant Underhill rushed to his post, and the deck groaned under his feet with the moans of every sailor that had drowned in these nefarious straits.'" Maia leaned back in her chair, _Guns at Dawn_ open in her hand. "Can I borrow this?"

"Don't get coffee on it," Alec said. "These are out of print."

The clock radio on the kitchen counter trilled, and Alec jumped to silence it. The digital numbers showed the time: 7:45 p.m. "Damn. I have to get ready."

Twilight was well on its way outside. The wind had ebbed, and the sky showing through the window shaded to violet, cut through by slashes of pallid cloud.

"It's a credit to the company when time goes too fast." Magnus stood, winding his hands on the back of the chair. His mind still twisted in endless coils over this revelation about Alec. His life had often been a tragicomedy, and now it might be tipping into outright farce. "I should probably go. You have watches to keep, ships to guide, and so on."

"It's gonna be a clear night. Mostly I'll be bored."

"Considering the job, I'd hope you'll be bored." Magnus cracked a slanted smile. "Thank you both. This was lovely."

Maia took his thanks with a smile of her own and began gathering the dishes. "Any time. You can come over again if you want. You think he passes muster, Alec?"

"Oh, sure. Definitely." Alec started a bit at her question, then glanced at Magnus. "Let me get your jacket."

He not only got the jacket, but held it out so Magnus could slide his hands through the sleeves, like some old-world gentleman. Magnus tugged the cuffs straight and breathed out, from deep in his chest, collecting himself.

Alec had opened the door, but he leaned on the jamb, his head canted back. "I'll be here. When you turn up something more, or if you need a research partner again."

A part of Magnus had hoped they could go tonight without mentioning the investigation. All else aside, his old hurts and reckless wants both, he liked Alec. He liked Maia, too, and being invited into their unusual, tight-knit unit for an evening had sated a loneliness he hadn't even noticed he carried.

The phantom of Alec's incidental touch, his palms on his shoulders, wrapped itself around Magnus.

"I know," he said.

He offered his hand, planning on a cordial shake in goodbye, but Alec grasped his hand and held it, his thumb slow on the curve of Magnus's forefinger. Magnus watched its minute movement, feeling his thoughts jitter and catch, like there were nothing so important as the near caress of Alec's thumb.

"Thanks." Alec let the handclasp drop. "For coming."

"Well, I'm glad you approve of my presence," Magnus said, a scratch in his timbre before it sleeked into frothy good humor. "Good night, Alexander."

Alec shook his head, but his eyes betrayed amusement. "Fine. If you have to. Be careful on the road, it's getting dark."

Magnus nodded to Alec, gave him a last look that twitched with that same fragile charge, and went to get his bicycle. The first stars of the evening shone overhead, and the roadside greenery was alive with tiny, flickering insects. The gears of the bicycle made a soft ticking sound as he walked, unwilling to let go of the feeling that had nestled in him.

There was one place in the world he knew he belonged. Catarina and Ragnor framed that place, the one harbor where he could always make land.

This was not that feeling, which formed the bedrock of his life. But it was kin to it, a lighter, sweeter cousin. A chance waiting to be taken. A hope and a desire for something to grow.

Behind him, a yellow beam spilled into the darkening sky. The lighthouse beacon turned, rhythmic and constant, lighting his way back.

 

*


	6. In the Cold Light

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A trip into town does not go as planned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all, I know, it's been 84 years. I can only blame the summer-autumn double punch of real life, and also the fact that this chapter is almost 9k and took forever.
> 
> On which note: Mindy, Lynne and Ruth H. all held my hand at various stages of drafting and were supremely sweet and encouraging, and then Ruth(erina), that is, my valiant beta, went through this and caught the places that still needed mortaring. A thousand thanks to all of you.

 

Over the next week or so, Magnus fell into a new routine. The farm was getting crowded with midsummer lodgers, and he needed somewhere new to do his thinking in peace.

Thus, first thing in the morning, he swung by the bakery in the village and made his way to the light station, where either Maia or Alec received him. They rotated the night watch duty between them, so one of them was usually still asleep. Magnus left his gift of baked goods in the office and, depending on the weather, sat down either on the porch or in the yard with his work.

He waded through the books Clary had brought and learned too many minutiae of local history for one man's sanity. He built himself a list of the symbols in Cleophas's cipher. On the third day, he asked Alec if he should find another corner of the village to haunt with his presence. Alec did something with his face that just about dropped the bottom from Magnus's stomach, his brows scrunching in an unfairly endearing way, and got out, "No, it's fine. We hardly notice you. Right, Maia?"

Maia, her nose deep in the literary indiscretions of Magnus's youth, said, "As long as he keeps bringing croissants, I don't mind."

Simple as that, it was settled.

The next morning Magnus dashed into the office barely ahead of a cloudburst. A side table next to the yard-side window had been cleared of papers. There was a thermos of coffee on it, made from Alec's personal stash, pinning down a note in slanted letters: _At the lighthouse if you need me. Maia's sleeping. —A_

He folded the note between his journal and took the offered corner, sipping slowly from the mug. It took him a long time to start working.

He faxed Ragnor what he could, using the noisy machine in the office. He stared at the drawing of the man with the lantern, and once caught Alec staring at him while he did, a stoop-shouldered shadow in the doorway. At Magnus's sideways glance, Alec ducked off the porch.

Some days Magnus lingered. The three of them gathered around Alec's TV for movies and subsequent spirited analysis between Magnus and Maia, seasoned with Alec's sparse but astute comments. Maia offered to put Magnus up in her spare room, but he always declined, instead going back to the farm in the twilight that barely dipped into darkness.

He and Alec talked about the investigation, and the goings-on at the light station, and never about the moment in the doorway after dinner. Magnus began to think he'd imagined the spark of interest in Alec's touch.

It wouldn't have been the first time he'd got his hopes up over nothing. If his hopes even _were_ on an upward trajectory. He took care to be nothing but cordial and companionable to Alec, and Alec answered with his candid brand of the same.

The month changed in a row of glassy, scorching days and sweltering nights. People on the main street murmured about forest fires and crops wilting in the fields. The sea receded from the shore, leaving the exposed rocks to collect rings of salt and grit at the new waterline. 

The air was oppressively humid when Magnus arrived at the light station. Dark clouds hung sullenly in the eastern sky. Maia was not present, but Alec was tackling the rowan seedlings with a bevy of threatening-looking garden tools. Apparently heat stroke was not a concern, since he worked bare-headed, streaked with sweat and dirt.

"Hey," he said. "Watch where you step. I'm sorta in the thick of it here."

Then, Magnus lost the words of his own greeting as Alec lifted the hem of his shirt and dried his face on it.

The gesture bared the jeans slung treacherously low on Alec's hips, and the fine, curled hair that ran down his stomach. He wasn't toned and trained so much as shaped by constant casual activity, limber and leanly muscled.

Magnus had a feverish flash of backing him into the shed wall. Of undoing his belt and kneeling in ardent study of his sweat-damp skin.

What came out of his mouth was, thankfully, "Working hard, I see. Did, ah—did Luke get a chance to look at the tree?"

"Not yet. He's been busy every time I asked, so I figured I'd get started on my own." Alec grimaced. "Another fun feature of this species: the fine roots are like steel cable. Already blunted one axe on 'em."

An infinitely safer topic. Magnus dove it into it with equal relief and regret. "This might sound incurably urban of me, but how about hiring a professional? I thought Maia knew someone horticulturally inclined."

"On our own dime, maybe. Our maintenance budget sucks." Alec shook his head. "This place isn't on top of anyone's to-do list in the Lights Commission. Still, it looks a lot better now than when Maia and I started out here."

Rare pride warmed his voice, and Magnus found himself smiling in response. Alec never said it outright, but it was plain he loved the _place_. The lighthouse most of all, but the wild nature of the headland in its danger and beauty, and the village as well. He seemed to have a caretaker's keen eye on them all.

"Sorry," Alec said. "You didn't come here so I could bore you with our shit finances."

"I came looking for a quiet place to do paying work." Magnus hefted his backpack, heavy with the dictionaries he'd borrowed with Clary's further assistance. "I have to hammer out a translation sample I forgot was due, and the farm—"

"I know what it gets like over there. Um. Since the weather's looking like that, I should go sit storm watch. I could do it from the house, but I kinda like it up in the lighthouse. If you wanna join me?"

"There's an adventure-loving boy in me that just screamed in delight," Magnus said, jolting Alec into a laugh that he averted to the side. "Join you and see the storm from up there? My only worry would be getting any work done."

"I'll keep you honest." Alec scowled at the roots poking up from the turned-up lawn. "You know where the coffee is, right? Make a pot, we can take it up with us. I'm gonna tidy up here."

"Of course." Magnus realized he didn't even blink at Alec's familiar assumption of sharing the preparations.

He made coffee, and, at his own discretion, some sandwiches. Alec slunk inside, showered, and slunk out of the bathroom again, regrettably clothed.

Magnus told himself he could be a decent person and not picture Alec wet and naked in _too_ much detail.

He was still a bit torn on that account when Alec unlocked the watch room at the top of the blue-painted staircase. The room filled the level, the observation windows allowing a full-circle view. While Alec went around the control panels, frowned at the radar, and checked readings whose purpose rather escaped Magnus, Magnus installed himself at an empty desk along the wall. The light had ebbed to a dull silver, dimmed by the thunderheads.

The rain came, and its rushing on the windows soothed his thoughts. He and Alec had become fairly good at sharing space in silence. Slowly Magnus descended into the depths of his source text and the hardships of the poetic form.

He'd found friendship here, welcome if not uncomplicated. Even when the investigation felt like an endless mire, the idea of visiting Alec and Maia kept him at it. Clary would also needle him about his research, but she'd been swept up in the business of the farm lately.

Alec's hand on his shoulder startled him. He pressed down on his grip, turning Magnus around in the swivel chair. "There's your storm."

Lightning licked the underside of the clouds, incandescent white splitting the gloomy air. When the thunder reached them, the rumbling rang around the horizon like a note along the brim of a crystal bowl. The heart of the storm was passing overhead and flinging its bright bolts with abandon. Magnus felt at once thrilled and secure, away from the rain in the shelter of the lighthouse.

Alec had leaned over his shoulder to watch the display, his mouth parted in unconscious fascination. Magnus almost lifted his hand to trace the pliant line of his lip, there close enough to kiss.

"It's beautiful," he said, soft and a little dazed, and leaned away as much as the chair allowed. "Thank you. Now, I'm afraid these verses won't untangle themselves."

"Oh. Sure." Alec pushed back with a small huff and went to the radar monitor. 

Alec's absence seemed to make a cold space where the warmth of his body had been, carelessly close.

 _You're an idiot_ , said the practical part of Magnus that had, years ago, broken his grief-stricken celibacy in a string of spectacular alcohol-fueled tumbles. _Buy him a drink and fuck him already. That should get him out of your system._

 _After all I've told him?_ whispered the part that still held the slippery blade of memory in its palm, wondering how hard to squeeze. _Shall I just make a move on him while we bang our heads on the mystery of my ex-lover's death? After I made that whole confession about George?_

It had not been a complete confession, either. He could talk about how that love had started, but the trouble was the ending—an ending he was trying to write now, a decade after the fact, because he'd never gotten one in the first place.

Magnus bent back to his work, too conscious of Alec on the other side of the room that now seemed as vast as the sea below.

 

*

 

Magnus was scanning the culture page of the Saintshead Gazette, his tea cooling on the kitchen table, when Clary tipped the top of the paper down from his face. "Morning. If you want a ride to Briarwood, I'm leaving in half an hour."

"I—if it's no trouble." He folded the paper away to cover his surprise. "I have been meaning to go."

"Meaning, you've been putting it off ever since you got back from that hike," she said brightly. "I'm taking the pickup, so there's room for a plus one. You can dig through the museum while I run errands."

This meant she was driving. Magnus's thirteen years of age on her had nothing to do with it. During the semester, she and Simon would drive almost an hour to school and back again every weekday.

At nineteen, Magnus had had a family driver his father would genteelly scorn him for never employing. It'd been the least of their philosophical differences.

"You've caught me in the pits of procrastination." He held his hands up. "Let me throw on something more presentable and I'll meet you out front."

"Thirty minutes, or I'm leaving without you!"

She would, too. He'd also let the new week start in idleness, so a well-meaning kick in the posterior was probably warranted. In twenty minutes, he was standing by the forest-green pickup truck that served as Clary's principal conveyance. She'd painted messy angel wings on both sides of the cabin.

She swung herself up behind the wheel and tossed a notepad onto the middle seat, filled with a to-do list. "You all set?"

"I am." Sketches in ballpoint pen framed the list: leaves and vines, done in her deft hand, with empty stems ending in stylized symbols. A sunburst. Curving parallel lines. Crossed tassels of wheat. The style was unsettling familiar. _Cloud, raven, star_ , Magnus thought, despite himself, and the thought chilled him.

He let her maneuver to the road before he asked, half compelled, "What are these, Biscuit?"

Clary glanced at him over her shoulder. "Um, just stuff. Why?"

"I... I saw these somewhere." He hoped the dodge wasn't too transparent. "But I've waded through too many dubious sources in the last weeks."

"I doodle when I'm thinking. They're not anything special."

"With the difference that your doodles are art in themselves." Magnus set the notepad down, face down on the seat. Folk art, Maia had said. There must be a hundred places Clary could have picked up the symbols. He shouldn't overthink this.

"Sure," she said. "When I'm famous, I'm gonna have somebody whose whole job is to preserve my shopping lists because they're worth thousands."

"That's the dream, no?"

Saintshead swam by under the opalescent haze of the sky. Lazy-looking cows, shaggy and black, grazed on the roadside. Clary turned onto the coastal road that meandered to the south through round-sloped hills.

"I'd have thought you'd know. Did I tell you about that boater lady last week who pulled me aside after breakfast and went—" Clary mimicked a note of delighted scandal "—'Darling, was that _Magnus Bane_ in your kitchen?'"

"I've had my picture in a national newspaper. If I had it _made_ , I wouldn't be breaking my research streak for paying work."

"It hasn't looked that much like a streak lately."

"Creation demands idleness at times, my dear." Magnus sprawled into the squeaky seat in a libertine fashion. The stifling warmth had already glued his silk-blend shirt to his back. "And—present company excluded—the environment could be more hospitable to my inquiries."

That had the sour taste of an excuse even to Magnus himself. Clary's expression said much the same, but her voice softened. "You picked a tough nut to crack. I didn't really think about it before. There's lots of local legends, and maybe in fifty years they'll tell those about the _Blackbird_ , too. When it's not so personal anymore."

"I've written about tragedies before," Magnus said. "It can be hard to get people to talk, but there's always _someone._ Disasters like this touch the whole community, but to be honest with you, I've never seen people close ranks like they did here. This is why I had to turn to literature, remember? Because no one would talk to me."

When he had first arrived, he'd envisioned a few weeks of interviewing people, with the added bonus of peaceful writing time by the seaside. He'd compose a thoughtful recounting of the accident, short biographies of the victims. With luck, he'd find someone to get him an in at the naval base at Seaward Point.

Reality had made a mockery of those ambitions soon enough.

Magnus had always dealt with his troubles in words. Poured his dawning attraction to men into fictional navy lieutenants and the pirates who loved them. Put his unconventional understanding of family into protagonists who made their own. Talked himself into the company of people who made things happen.

Even with nine years as insulation between him and the loss, George was a stillness inside him. A mute absence, an empty page that seemed to take no ink.

"Magnus?"

"Forgive me." He focused again on Clary. "I must've drifted."

"I said, do you want me to try?" Her eyes were on the road, her hands steady on the wheel, but her shoulders were tense. "I could ask around for you."

"After I declared my intentions to poke this beehive? That might put you in an awkward situation, asking the same questions." Magnus found he had fewer compunctions about involving Alec or even Maia, but Clary was deeply connected to Saintshead. She was planning a whole life there, while Alec and Maia were both likely to leave this roost in due time, Maia to her degree and Alec—

Magnus pulled himself back from that byroad.

"Maybe not about the _Blackbird_ , then," Clary said. "Just the other stuff. Any other wrecks and so on. Anything in the books I brought you?"

"Layers and layers of local history. Am I mistaken in assuming Luke changed his last name? I find a long line of Graymarks around Saintshead, but no Garroways."

"Garroway was their mom's maiden name." She gave a muted smile. "She was from—somewhere on South Isle. If you made me guess, Luke wanted some distance from Cleophas."

"Not a popular part of family history, I take it."

"He never talks about her." She squinted at a road sign with undue vigor. "Well. He barely talks about Mom's death either."

"I'm sorry." Was it him, or did everyone he'd met on this trip have a sad story? It was part of his job to prod and unearth and intuit, but he prided himself in having a delicate hand with people. You could only push so far. "When did your mother pass away, exactly?"

"Eight years ago. Right after I turned eleven." Her mouth pressed shut. "I don't remember a lot about that year."

"I didn't mean to pry." A foreboding crept over Magnus. Nine years ago. Eight years ago. That was a brief time frame for concentrated tragedy in such a small place.

"No, I just—things have been kinda weird with Luke. We don't usually fight, but lately—" Clary sank despondently into her seat. "It's not your problem. He'd hate that I even brought it up."

"Of course, Biscuit." He gave her shoulder a pat. "How about you drop me off at the museum, I'll learn what I can, and I'll meet you in town for lunch? No mention will be made of awkward family affairs."

Relief broke across her scrunched brows. "Yeah, sure. I'd like that."

 

*

 

The Rosewell Maritime Museum was housed in an aged red-brick building perched along the snake-curve of the road on the last hill before Briarwood. A trickle of holiday-goers filled the grounds. Magnus went around a gaggle of children surrounding a historical ship engine mounted in the front yard, and passed into the pleasantly cool interior.

He took his time with the permanent exhibit: the birth of sea trade, developments in navigation and ship technology, the significance of the Rosewell-Lakesend Seaway that ran past Saintshead, too. While a hodgepodge, it was an industriously curated one. In a side room, he found a wall filled with magnified black-and-white photographs, sailors and shipwrights on their vessels, a cavalcade of anchor chains and mastheads against the lingering horizon.

He let his hand hover over the pictures. Not all of them even had labels. Only people long since dead, caught at their work, like insects in amber. Riddles without context. Names upon names.

Four bedraggled men stood on a pier against the side of a ship, their faces blurred into near anonymity. The label next to the photograph said, _The surviving crew of the lightship IGV 1-56_ Robin.

Magnus gave a choked-off gasp. He covered the extra characters with his fingers, then lifted them away. There they were. The letters from the hill.

An attendant came into the room, perhaps beckoned by his unseemly noise of surprise, and he composed himself. "Excuse me. Would you know anything about this incident here?"

She folded her hands behind her back. "The sinking of the _Robin_? She hit St. Edmund's Reef, off Saintshead, which is a pretty common story around here. Some hundred and thirty years ago, right around when the Saintshead Light was being built."

"Right. Ah—what happened to the ship itself?"

"She sank. There were rumors about a mutiny aboard, but they were never confirmed. Those four men in the picture were the only survivors. If you're interested, I can point you to the shop. We have some books—"

"Thank you." He barely kept a polite face. "Thank you, that's plenty. You've been very helpful."

He needed air. The inside of the museum probably offered better in that department, with the air conditioning humming away, but he slumped down on the plinth of the engine out front and breathed in and out for a few deep lungfuls.

Every vessel of the Islands Guard had the name of a bird, from humble patrol boats to the regal _Swan of Kirkwall_. Whoever had started the tradition, it persisted religiously.

 _GV 1- ROB_ was the IGV _Robin_ , and its wreckage lay under the sea off Saintshead Cape, except for the twisted steel parts that were inexplicably buried on a hillside hundreds of yards above the waterline.

Magnus clutched the undeveloped film roll in his fist. What did he have? He had his own memory, which Alec could corroborate, and a negative he'd carried in his pocket for weeks of indecision. A picture that was proof of the steel remains.

That made two sunken military vessels—or more. St. Edmund's Reef was a notorious ship graveyard. Magnus had looked into its history of shipwrecks, mostly as something to mention as background tidbits, but was there more there? _What_ was that _more_ , for that matter?

He had half an hour's walk into town to meet Clary for lunch. He could drop off his negatives and pray he could get them back today. A tremor went through him at every breath, unspent energy coiled like a spring.

The walk would clear his head, and he'd chat with Clary about her artistic dreams and deal with this when he was alone.

 _Alone? Don't you have a co-conspirator?_ There was that too-perceptive inner voice again. _Alec as good as told you to keep involving him._

 _Yes_ , Magnus retorted, _but I don't think he's aware that his presence in the same room is genuinely starting to cloud my thinking._

He'd given himself this summer to sort through his ghosts. Acquiring new phantoms to haunt him had not been in the plan.

He got to his feet and made them carry him down the road.

 

*

 

The town of Briarwood had a warmer charm than Saintshead. Surrounded by woods and meadows and fields, it was sheltered from the ocean's crueler moods at the bottom of a large, shallow bay. Streets filled with shops and eateries in quaint timber frame houses branched out from the marina that formed the heart of the town. A straggling collection of villas stretched south of the marina, cupped around a wide white beach that bustled with swimmers and sun-bathers. Magnus spared the beach a longing glance. The same waters bordered Saintshead, but the shore there was all sharp rock and tough seagrass, the land cloven abruptly from the ocean.

Clary had chosen a cozy hole-in-the-wall restaurant serving seasonal dishes. Sitting outside, they ate cold soup and steaming bread and talked about light things. Magnus felt his heart give up some of its strain.

"Time to head back?" he said, once they'd gotten through dessert and coffee, and there was no more delaying. "You're a busy young lady, I know, but I should make a detour to the library. I'll take the evening bus back."

"I _should_ head back." Clary tilted her chair to the side. "I kinda don't want to. It's been ages since I got away from the farm." She eyed the hubbub at the waterfront with blatant yearning.

"I don't think I had half your sense of duty at that age," Magnus said. "If you walk me to the library, you can say you were helping me navigate this new locale. We can take the scenic route."

"You're good at this. I should be taking notes."

"Creative half-truths are an occupational hazard, I'm afraid."

With a peal of laughter, she got to her feet. They twined between market stalls scattered along the marina, dodged seagulls fighting over takeaway scraps, and were, for a moment, free. Right then Magnus felt a kinship with Clary: the need to escape from something at once difficult and beloved.

Something strained between her and Luke. Parting pains, Magnus supposed. Even though she meant to stay close to home, she was out of childhood and spreading her own wings. And she was a living reminder of the woman Luke had loved and lost, always the girl Jocelyn had left in his care. Magnus could imagine that letting her fly was not easy.

They wandered into the tail end of a street fair. In a paved plaza, a band of somewhat wavering quality still played on an open-air stage. They'd gathered both listeners and dancers, a few couples swaying to a traditional waltz. Humming along, Clary fumbled for the lyrics. "What's this called? 'In summer my love is still my own, her tresses red as the rowan's crown', and so on? Mom loved this one."

"Where I come from, they call it 'The Rowan Tree'." Magnus blinked back an unexpected sting of memory. "So did mine, once upon a time."

That was one sentence too many out of his mouth, but Clary only offered a smile. Not one of her easy, sunny ones, but a soft, wistful curve of her mouth. They listened to the violinist slide into the solo, suddenly more confident in his solitude. Magnus had the familiar itch to move to the music, to let it swing him through its flowing courses.

"It _is_ them," said someone behind him. "Hey, Fray. Fancy seeing you here."

"Hi, Maia," Clary said, and that should've been a warning, but Magnus was still struck unaware by Maia and Alec, standing on the sidewalk. Alec raised his hand in a sort of wave.

"I thought one of you was contractually chained to the light station at all times." Magnus managed to sound mostly jocular.

"One of us had a broken couch he was taking forever to get rid of," Maia said. "Please, even lightkeepers get temps."

"And one of us wanted to see her favorite depressing sci-fi flick on the one, single, day they're showing it at the movies," Alec fired back. "Like I couldn't get somebody else to help me move the couch."

" _Blade Runner_ is a modern classic, you uncultured rube."

"Haven't you seen it like a hundred times?" Alec stepped back as Magnus and Clary extracted themselves from the crowd. The next piece was pulling more people onto the fluctuating dance floor, and its borders widened accordingly. "What are you guys doing here?"

"Research," Clary said with brittle-sounding cheer, pointing at Magnus, "and errands." She indicated herself. "Is that the movie you keep telling me about, Maia? The one with the mind-blowing monologue?"

"The one and the same." Maia ducked over to Clary, leaving Magnus on the spot with Alec and his disarming mock annoyance at her.

"Research?" Alec echoed.

"I went to the museum, and Clary's taking me to the library. I hoped a change of scenery might open up something new." _He's rather close to being your friend. You can have a civil conversation._ In truth, Alec _was_ the closest thing Magnus had to a confidant here. He'd been there for the more disturbing turns of the whole investigation, save for this last one at the museum.

"I thought you were busy with the poetry. Since you haven't been coming around this week."

Alec sounded covertly dejected. Magnus had let several days pass without venturing to the lighthouse. Their afternoon up in the watch room had left him off balance, revolving wildly around the question of—of Alec himself, and all the associated hurdles.

"I was. Busy." Magnus took up the offered explanation, and then made a decision in that same breath. "I found something at the museum. It might only be a curiosity, but I wanted to look into it."

Alec looked somehow softer here, in the afternoon light dappled by the linden trees, against the fairytale houses of the harbor quarter rather than the steep cliffs of the headland. Magnus tried to decide if he liked it, then gave up the attempt.

It hardly mattered. The investigation was still the agreed-upon core of their peculiar partnership. Magnus should concentrate on that part rather than the way the leaf-filtered light brought out the hints of green in Alec's eyes.

"You want some company for that?" Alec's casual tone tripped on some other emotion hidden beneath.

"For the library?" Magnus said, in what was surely a swooping personal low of ineloquence.

"Yeah." A smile flickered in Alec's eyes, there and gone, but his shoulders loosened. "My options for this evening are either dumping Maia and going home, or sitting through three hours of man's inhumanity to man while she blisses off to geek heaven."

"That's not really the central thesis of _Blade Runner_ , but point taken." Magnus could refuse. Counterpoint: two would get through the reference library faster than one. "Are you sure you want to spend your day off on this?"

"If it hurts you to take my help, you could always bribe me into it. Food's a decent option."

Magnus burst into laughter. "Whatever am I going to do with you, Alexander?"

"Not call me that," Alec mumbled, but his afflicted sigh turned into a chuckle. "Fine, I said you could. There's a nice place by the beach that does, like, various Mediterranean things, if that floats your boat?"

"It might." _You can do this_ , Magnus told himself.

You did not turn down people who offered their support from the heart. Magnus had learned better than to spurn it, on those rare occasions the offer was sincere.

"Hey, Alec!" Maia called from the side, making them both veer her way. "You're off the hook. I'm taking Clary to the movie. I'll catch a ride back with her."

"Can you show Magnus to the library, please?" Clary piped up. Magnus thought a fleeting thought about how Luke would receive this further extension of her flight from farm chores, but he was hardly her keeper. She knew her own chances better than him.

"Yeah," Alec said, abruptly gruff. "Okay, Maia, got it. See you tomorrow."

She cocked an eyebrow that transmitted some wordless but profound message between them. "Try to have a _little_ fun while you're here. Just a tiny bit. A smidge. I swear it won't kill you."

"No promises."

"That sounds like an order," Magnus heard himself say. "I'm not sure how good a time the library is, but I'll do what I can to make that happen."

"Thank you!" Maia hollered, while Clary waved from behind her. The girls peeled away, and it struck Magnus that they'd very neatly abandoned him in Alec's company.

"Half a day's labor for dinner then?" Alec sounded a little sheepish. "We, ah, we should get going. The library closes at seven."

Robbed of other options, Magnus made a grandiose hand gesture. "It seems I've taken you up on that offer. Lead on."

Behind them, the music ended, the violin dithering in the air for a few final notes. Magnus let his steps fit themselves to them until the violin, too, fell silent.

As they wound their way out of the tourist-dotted historical quarter, Magnus caught Alec up on his museum visit. To his surprise, his voice stayed calm and even conversational. Maybe it was that Alec had yet never dismissed any part of their discoveries, no matter how colorful or outlandish they seemed.

"A lightship," Alec said, when Magnus finished. They were going down the side of a park, the trees casting shimmering shadows on the cobblestone street. The peaking heat subsumed noise and activity, so they had the wide promenade nearly to themselves.

"I noticed that, too."

"They used lightships at Saintshead before they put up the beacon, but I've never heard of one called _Robin_."

"That attendant I spoke to said there were rumors of a mutiny aboard. This was an Islands Guard ship. Is it possible the mutiny was real, and it was hushed up as some shameful episode unbecoming of the honor of our naval defenders?"

Alec dawdled for a step or two, mulling that over. "The Briarwood Post was up and running at that time. Maybe something made the news."

"You're quite the amateur archivist." The damnedest thing about Alec's company was how it could set Magnus at his ease. He let himself stop fighting it. Just for now. "I shouldn't be surprised. You've proven to be a man of many talents."

"Or I have a modicum of common sense." Alec made an indecipherable noise. His cheeks looked ruddy, but it might have been the sun.

"You don't think it's eerie?" Magnus extended the question like a stick at suspiciously thin ice. "Two military ships with such a similar end."

"Are you asking me if I think there was foul play involved with the _Blackbird_? You're the one who's been researching this for months."

"That'd be a pretty brazen conclusion to draw on the information we have. In any case, I'd never ask you to draw it."

"Right, I'm just the pretty assistant," Alec said, deadpan. "Sorry for the lack of sequins."

Magnus, on the other hand, spluttered to a halt. " _Alexander._ Please. You're my steadfast guide. I can't even find the library in these twisting streets."

"Sure you could." Alec made to nudge Magnus's shoulder, then pointed instead at a beautiful brick-and-glass building across the street. The windows of the facade showed rows of shelves filling the second floor above bright copper-colored letters that said LIBRARY. "Just follow the signs."

 

*

 

Several hours later, Magnus was in sore need of coffee, nursing a papercut on his thumb, and a crick was burrowing deeper into his neck with every sluggish minute. The book he had open on the reading desk, portentously titled _Ships of the Archipelago_ , was proving to be a wash.

Then Alec leaned over the desk and laid a few photocopied pages on top of Magnus's notes. "Here. Look at this."

"I'm looking." Magnus rubbed at his right eye. A perplexing plenty spread before him: newspaper articles in antiquated type; an image of a sailing ship reduced to a relief of black and white by the copy machine.

"That's the _Robin_ , there," Alec said, "and here are Samuel Blackwell and Emil Pangborn." He tapped on a newspaper clipping. "Both lived around Saintshead. Both served on the ship."

Magnus furrowed his brow at the grainy text. Alec had scrawled dates next to the articles.

Then the thing Alec had spotted scraped dread down Magnus's spine, that crack and jolt of something unpleasant clicking together. "And both of them died within a year of the wreck."

He read the brief news item over again. Blackwell and Pangborn had disappeared from the latter's family farm in Saintshead on a foggy autumn night. There was a statement from Blackwell's sister, who lamented that her brother had become melancholy and agitated in turns since his return from the sea. Another article, from two weeks later, delivered the laconic ending that the men were presumed dead.

Magnus was aware of Alec beside him, waiting for him to absorb the information. _Search parties have been dispatched to the hills, where Mr. Blackwell would often spend long days—_

"The hills. Sinner's Ledge?"

"I thought it might be." Alec spoke low. "They survived that wreck, but most of the crew didn't. At that time you would've needed a crew of fifteen or twenty, so that makes for a lot of dead men you knew up close and personal."

"So, they might have walked to their deaths in the fog." Magnus stopped his hand from seeking Alec's shoulder, even for a simple grip of sympathy and support. The hills were still vivid in his own memory. "On a penitent's climb?"

"I don't know." Alec took the chair on Magnus's right, angled toward him. "This does nothing to explain the bell."

"The girl at the photographer's promised she'd mail the pictures I took to me tomorrow." Magnus needed to stick to facts, and _the bell_ belonged on the side of squirming conjecture that refused to be quantified in any way. "Should we—is there—"

He blew his lungs empty, the ends of his questions crumbling into nothing.

"All these are from the Briarwood Post," he said. "What about the Saintshead Gazette? Does it go back that far?"

Alec was on good terms with one of the librarians, and she'd sneaked him into the newspaper archives. It had been time better spent than Magnus's hours in the reference library.

"It does," said Alec, "and here's the kicker: there's nothing. Not a single mention of two locals going missing. I even asked Lydia if I'd missed anything."

For days, Magnus had had a feeling like he was treading water. He'd amassed more and more pieces of a puzzle that could not be fit together. A fair many of the pieces probably belonged to another set altogether.

_Cleophas Graymark. The rowan tree. The bell on the hill. The man with the lantern. Not one, but two sunken ships. Or more._

_And a village that will not speak of any of this._ Magnus kneaded his temple with a knuckle. _They've held their silence for over a century, if the signs are to be believed._

_Just follow the signs._

"Alec," he said, "forgive me if I'm trespassing, but did Luke ever mention Cleophas to you? In any kind of confidential way?"

"No. She's a closed chapter for him, as far as I know. But he's not too happy here. I always thought it was too many bad memories. You know how it is."

"I do." Magnus knew his smile was pale, but he met Alec's eye without hesitation. "I want to go back up that hill. The next day the weather's good and you're free."

"My dance card's a little full, but I'll squeeze you in."

Magnus let the candid acceptance in Alec's words warm him. _Something_ is _crooked in Saintshead, but at least I have you._

In the background, the hour had crept to seven o'clock, and Alec's librarian friend shooed them efficiently out the door with their plans and photocopies. Magnus stored the papers in the safety of his backpack and, with a deliberate effort, pried his thoughts loose from them.

"Please tell me this Mediterranean place of yours does a martini," he said, laced with a sigh. "I'm entirely too sober for—for all of this, really."

"You'll have to ask." Alec's cheek dented, as if he'd bitten into it, but he marshaled himself into a measure of self-irony. "I'm not much of a drinker. Of cocktails, at least. I can name six kinds of good wine—thanks, Mom—and pretend to like beer when I have to. Anyway, we're gonna miss the evening bus, so I'm driving."

Magnus cut this charming ramble with a laugh that he hoped was more good-natured than dismissive. "Oh, trifles. The night'll be warm, we can sleep in a grain field if we find ourselves abroad too late."

"Yeah, and then Maia kills me when I don't show up for lens-washing day."

"I see how it is. And I did promise her I'd take care of you."

Alec made a rasping sound in reply, half a laugh, half something else, and Magnus rather had to tear his gaze away. He recovered enough to say, "One drink, then, with dinner? For the sake of my splendid company."

"Okay," Alec said, still too low in his throat, like Magnus had asked something far more risque. "I've actually never had a martini."

Magnus could do this. Dinner with Alec was hardly untrod ground, even without Maia there to be a prickly, benevolent buffer to the occasional moment where he might miss a step.

"Now that is some kind of crime," he said. "One I'll be happy to correct."

 

*

 

It was much later when they left the restaurant, calling out their thanks and good nights. Magnus knocked his shoulder into Alec's as they stepped onto the end of the street. The restaurant was the last building on it, before it petered down into gravel and then the sand of the beach. Mellow music flowed from the speakers of the bar next door. Its blue-shimmering sign was the only light competing with the moon that gleamed through the filmy clouds.

"—Then Jace did _something_ upstairs, I still don't know what because Izzy was four beers drunk and saying she wanted to meet Jessica, and I was busy fending her off and regretting my life choices." Alec paused to sigh in amused brotherly frustration. Magnus was coming to recognize it. "In hindsight, Jace saved me. By breaking the door to Dad's study. It was hardwood, so the door survived, but the hinges gave."

"Oh, god." Magnus buried his merriment in his palm. "As the eldest, you were presumably in charge."

"I took it seriously, too," Alec said. "So I had a house full of drunk teens and a broken door to that one room in the house we were never supposed to go in."

The sand scuffed under their shoes. The beach was empty except for a smattering of deserted sunshades and a few rowboats pulled onto the sand. Brine seasoned the air, the waves muttering as they met the shore.

"I'd better not guess the ending."

"It was better than we thought. Mom got home first, and when she saw the door, she—this part I remember, because it was so weird at the time—she laughed a bit, and ruffled my hair, and went to call a repair guy." A fence encircled the boat berth, and Alec leaned on one bleached wooden post.

"You've certainly painted a stern picture of her." Magnus felt light on his feet on the grace of a few drinks, in that content zone that lifted your spirits but would not weigh your head in the morning. They'd switched smoothly between teller and listener for most of the meal. Isabelle and Jace seemed to be an inexhaustible wellspring of reckless escapades.

"Izzy says she's changed since the divorce."

 _Your sister says? Don't you know?_ Magnus had assumed Alec's life still included some manner of visits with the faraway family. Even with the painful history there, they meant very much to Alec; that shone through in every story.

"What happened to this mysterious girlfriend?" Maybe it was better to divert them from the topic of parental opinion. "The one Isabelle was so curious about."

"Uh, she never existed." Alec fretted his fingers, apparently without noticing. There was another thing about him: his hands revealed his moods as much as his face. "But it was another six months before I came out to Izzy. Her and Jace, because I figured I could have two awkward conversations in one go."

Magnus nodded, drawn by the tender gravity of Alec putting into words what he'd already suspected. Alec had taken the fact that Magnus's lost lover was a man so matter-of-factly. In this sense, they'd formed a fellowship from the first meeting.

"I want to ask," he said, consciously mellow, "but only if you want to tell."

"There wasn't much fanfare." Alec slouched deeper against the fence. "I said, Iz, Jace, I'm gay. She smiled and said, we kinda knew. Jace hugged me. Then Izzy gave me shit for two weeks about making up a girlfriend."

"Only for two weeks, though." Magnus let a laugh slip free, and heard Alec echo him in a more ragged note. "I'm not an expert in sibling affairs, but that seems almost reasonable."

"They were never the problem," Alec said. "My parents—well, Mom's come around. I haven't really talked to Dad about it much. The grandparents are another story, but—"

"Not one for tonight, yes."

It was Alec's turn to nod, in wordless agreement, and they looked out over the fence, side by side, as the slow night tide came in. Magnus felt something in his bones hum in time with the waves, a stubborn shiver of fear and possibility so tightly knit you could not tell them apart.

He wanted to look at Alec. Maybe no more than that. Just sneak a glance to make sure he was there.

Before he could muster his courage, the silence between them was broken by familiar chords from the bar speakers. They drifted honey-dark on the air, lofting the female singer's voice.

Exhaling, Magnus let himself sway through a few dance steps. The movement at least let him bleed off the nervous energy.

From behind him, Alec said, "You're doing it again."

"Doing what?"

"Dancing to yourself. You were doing it on the plaza earlier, when we ran into you."

Magnus halted. Maybe he was teetering on the inside, but he smoothed himself down, flashed Alec a smile. "I'm afraid it's this song. It makes my feet move, no matter the time or place or lack of a partner. Unless you dance?"

"When I have to?" Alec ducked his head so his hair tumbled over his eyes. "I had lessons. It's been a while."

"Nobody here to judge you," Magnus said. He couldn't very well back away now. "I'll lead, if you wish."

He extended a hand, and still his breath chopped suddenly as Alec laid his own in it and allowed himself to be brought close. Alec's other hand fell on Magnus's shoulder, his palm light and warm like it knew its place there.

Magnus had danced all his life. That old familiarity came to his rescue, as it always did, steering him into the music as it wrapped itself around them both. Alec mumbled something about his shoes not being made for dancing, and Magnus hushed him gently. Once he relaxed a notch, he stepped as surely to the music as he did across hill and heath.

"Why this song?" Alec asked, by his ear.

Magnus shook himself from the spell of the music enough to answer. "The first time I heard it, I felt like it was for me. It may be a straightforward song, but there's a power in that. You know, that one part, 'the bright blessed day, the dark sacred night'. I think..."

"You think?"

"There are things we have to do in the shadows before we can do them in the light. It doesn't diminish them. Or make them less true."

Alec said, still softly, "Is that how you dealt with it? Figuring out—what you like, exactly."

If they were flirting, Magnus had seldom done it like this. More smoldering glances and hands under clothes were usually involved. He dipped his face close to Alec's shoulder and soaked in his nearness, the simple intimacy of moving in unison. Here, in the summer twilight, they made a small safe place between them.

"I like people," he said. "Men, women, and the rest of them. But I was lucky. When I was questioning everything, I was surrounded by people who never questioned me."

"That's pretty lucky. Yeah." Alec swallowed. With his ear practically pressed to Alec's neck, Magnus heard the click of his throat.

From there, they veered around and around as long as the crooning verses lasted. They separated the same way they'd come together, hands dwelling on wrists and forearms, heads bent as if over a shared secret. Magnus's breath hitched on each inhalation.

He looked up to see, through his own lowered lashes, Alec flick his tongue over his lips as if they were dry.

 _It's not just me_. Magnus didn't know if it was dread or hope that struck a hammer blow on his heart. Too soon and yet not soon enough, Alec stepped back and tipped around himself, the heel of his sneaker digging a crescent into the sand.

"Okay. That wasn't awful. I didn't even step on your toes."

Magnus took a few sideways steps back to the fence, and a few furtive breaths to settle himself. The moon painted a trembling swath of silver across the near-smooth water. "You're fine. Stop worrying."

"I'm not." The fence jolted as Alec climbed up to sit on top, his shoulder on level with Magnus's eye.

"You asked," Magnus began. His fingers gripped the cracked, weatherbeaten wood of the fence. "You ask how I dealt."

"Yeah." Alec shifted, maybe just for balance. His right hand landed on the fence, a few critical inches from Magnus's own.

"I wrote it out. I know, that's what you'd expect, but it didn't seem so obvious then. I wrote what I wanted out into a fantasy, and it gave me words to bring it into the real world."

"Huh." Alec's gentle, expressive hand flexed. "For me it was the other side of that. I told you, my family's on the traditional side. I studied hard instead of making friends. I swam and ran track and did archery. Whatever they expected."

"Who needs happiness when you have discipline?" Magnus poured too much froth into his voice. _Don't think about father now._

Alec shrugged, as if trying to shake something off. "Well, I had books. Mom decided it was good for us to read, so we got to read. I used to hide at the bay window upstairs and just... disappear." He tarried. "Like into those Age of Sail novels. It probably sounds corny to you—they're just adventure. Lots of unlikely ship physics, I'm pretty sure. But there was somebody like me in those books. Somebody who had to choose duty every time, until he decided, not again."

"I know what you mean." Magnus heard his own voice drop. As if on a counterweight, guilt rose up in turn. _God, I've let him talk too long._

"Yeah?" Alec glanced at him. "I guess you must. I was seventeen and I didn't know anybody who felt like me. But I thought, somebody out there put this kind of love in a story. It has to exist. It has to be real."

Around the aching lump in his throat, Magnus swallowed. Alec's hushed honesty was rather more than any person could be asked to bear.

"I know," he said, rough. "I put it there."

"'If there's no land that will suffer us, we'll make the sea our kingdom—'" Alec huffed. "That's from the second book. It used to be like an anthem to me."

"'We'll make the sea our kingdom, and write its laws ourselves'," Magnus filled in the quote. In theory, he could have stopped himself. "It's a bit much, but at least it's sincere."

"You've read them." Alec's voice clotted with abrupt wonder and confusion. "Grant's books."

"Alec." Magnus heard in his mind the first distant roar that heralded a groundswell. "I wrote them. Six months to a book, in between lectures."

"What?" Alec's eyes narrowed. His face closed by degrees like blinds hiding the light.

"They're the first thing I ever published." Magnus pressed his eyes shut, then opened them. "I—they're not under my name because I didn't want people"— _my family—_ "to know."

"Is this some kind of joke?" Alec's feet thumped to the ground. You could see him armoring himself. "You've been to my place. I've had those books around. I told you I'd read them."

"I'm not joking. I put myself through my second university year on _Guns at Dawn_." Magnus's quick wits could bring up nothing but a steady supply of inanity. "'Grant' is—"

"Yeah, I can see where that comes from. I took French, too." Alec paced, in hard, jerky movements. "So you moonlighted in trashy pop lit but couldn't own up to it? And I've been—talking to you, and you pretend to get it, to get _me_ , like you're _interested_ in what comes out of my mouth."

"Alexander."

"You don't call me that, not after this." For a moment, Alec sounded horribly young. "After all this, I don't rate that much consideration. Hey, Alec, here's a little thing you don't know about me, but _maybe you should_."

"It's not that simple," Magnus blurted out. "It's been a decade. More than that. I'm not—I was someone else back then." _I loved someone else. Someone who's everywhere in those pages. Someone I see in your shadow sometimes, even now, whether I want to or not._

"Seems simple enough to me. Either you cared enough to tell me, or you didn't."

His throat thick, Magnus looked at Alec's face and the hurt etched there, however Alec tried to conceal it. _I barely know you. Whether you want me to or not_. The admission tasted ashen.

He made himself say, "All right. Then I didn't."

One thing was for certain. Magnus had shattered the fragile rapport they'd built here, on the vacant beach in the dark, smashed it into a thousand pieces.

 _Well, it's hardly the first time you've broken something you were trusted with_.

He looked up toward the street and its ribbon of lamps, leading back into the midnight town. "I'll find somewhere to stay the night and take the bus back."

Alec inhaled through his nose. "I said I'd drive you." It had the sound of an order being acknowledged. Of course. Alec had said he'd see Magnus home, so he would.

There was nothing else for it.

"As you wish," Magnus said. "And after that?"

Alec turned on his heel, but his words came clear enough. "Tomorrow I'm gonna help Maia wash the damn lens, and you can do whatever the fuck you want."

Then he went up the slope, not checking if Magnus would follow.

 

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few things: This is where we stop pretending the Saintshead Light works quite like a real lighthouse. Artistic licence has been applied for the sake of the story.
> 
> The _Blade Runner_ reference dates this story, and I've had a few questions to this effect, so, for the curious: this fic is set in a vague version of the 80s. I haven't been totally faithful to or consistent with technological developments, but I feel like that's my right in a magical realism AU. (Also, yes, I know the movie is two hours long. xD)
> 
> Magnus is, of course, quoting 'What a Wonderful World' near the end there.


	7. Broken Glass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Magnus burns, pines, perishes, and makes a fateful call.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ruth is my hero of canny beta-reading feats and Mindy is the best writing date a girl could ask for. ♥ You can thank 'em both for this chapter even existing.
> 
>  **Content Note** : This chapter includes discussion of death, grief and mourning.
> 
> Also! I keep saying this: I only write happy endings. I promise I do.
> 
> This story now also has a **soundtrack**! [track listing on tumblr](https://poemsfromthealley.tumblr.com/post/189270288702/fic-mix-to-the-lighthouse) | [playlist on youtube](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7QvupXaFsbv1zFVhSmo1_VRsEjWxSgFs)
> 
> tumblr @[poemsfromthealley](https://poemsfromthealley.tumblr.com/)  
> twitter @[juneofthepen](https://twitter.com/juneofthepen)  
> If you want to live tweet (that would be delightful), the story hashtag is #tsitsfic

 

At the sign of Three Arrows Farm, Magnus got out of the van and shut the door with a dull clang. Alec was a ghostly reflection in the windshield, his eyes fixed ahead. The van raised the dust of the road into a drifting plume in its wake.

They hadn't exchanged a single word during the drive. Magnus had seen brick walls more breachable than the silence in the cabin. In comparison, the swaddling night air was light and easy to breathe.

It did nothing to lift his spirits. He trudged up the driveway past the nocturnal chorus of crickets in the hedges.

_Some wordsmith you are. An hour of silence because suddenly you have no idea what to say._

_Nothing that would help_ , Magnus argued back to himself. _I let that go much too far. At least I didn't kiss him before ruining everything. That'd have been a fine cherry on top of the disaster cake._

The crisp voice of professional judgment joined in with, _If you just wanted to spice up a research trip, there were easier options than the person you pretty much hung your entire investigation on._

 _Yes, yes, I'm a complete heel_ and _I just ruined half the work I've done here, I get it—_

Two things cut into his acrid debate with the better angels of his nature: Clary's pick-up was parked in the front yard. Long scrapes marred the paint of the hood, and something had punched a sunburst crack into the windshield on the driver's side.

Magnus had just finished gasping at that, when raised voices came from the house. The kitchen light was on and the front door ajar.

"You're in the wind all day without a word to me, and come back with a car five minutes from the wrecking yard! Give me one good reason not to ground you for the rest of the summer."

"I called," Clary's voice, thick with upset, interrupted Luke. "Three times! Maia can prove that. You didn't pick up, and I called at dinnertime, as if there's nobody in the house then. I'm nineteen, I'm not a kid you can send to her room!"

Magnus crept in the door. From the kitchen doorway, Maia cast a look at him that rather said, _we're in it now._ Past her, Luke and Clary—at least she was in a shape to argue, which was a slim relief—went on.

"You're still under my roof." Something more brittle than anger strained up through Luke's voice. "You went off the road. On our home road. You or Maia could've been seriously hurt."

"I know." Clary faced Luke across the end of the table, her hands curled into fists on the polished top. "It's just—I wanted to help Magnus, okay? Nobody else is, and something weird is going on in town. You know there is."

Magnus exchanged a glance with Maia. Bafflement ruled her expression, but she made a delicate hand motion toward the door.

"I told you to stay well away from it!" Now Luke's temper rose. "There are things in this place you don't understand. Bad things. This isn't some fairytale you can play out in the backyard, kiddo. Getting mixed up in them has cost me enough family, I—"

"Like Mom?" Clary stood up to her whole slender height, her jaw trembling. The word went through Luke's measured restraint like a shot and struck deep. "Is this what happened to her, too? Am I getting _sick_?"

At this point, Maia nudged at Magnus's arm. He knew she had the right idea. The father-daughter quarrel had just pitched itself off a deeply personal end, and they both stood there like a couple of eavesdropping fools.

 _There are things in this place you don't understand._ He felt macabrely like a man strung between two horses: one hauled him toward the door, and the other, treacherously, to the kitchen to pour out the questions that thronged up from the recesses of his mind.

 _She heard the island._ So Luke had described his sister at the start of Magnus's stay. Magnus had even scribbled the phrase in the margin of his journal. It had sounded like a quaint way to say someone was eccentric or maybe holding on to beliefs and customs that society at large had left in the dust of history.

What was the _island_? A metaphor or an actuality?

Who else had this place taken away? How many times? Maia's hand was on his shoulder. Magnus brushed it off.

"She was never missing," he said, stepping into the kitchen from the twilit hallway.

Clary's hand went to her mouth. Luke's concerned scowl at her turned into a full-out glare as he swung around to Magnus.

"Maia or I were with her the whole day." Even when leaping headfirst into a volatile situation, Magnus tended to trust his eloquence to carry him. "She was safe."

As soon as the words left his mouth, he saw that was the wrong tactic.

Luke spoke low and thick, clotted with anger. "You don't know what you're talking about. You have no idea what you've dragged my daughter into."

"Not to be self-centered, but it was _my_ decision," Clary cut in. "It's not like you tell me anything!"

"Don't I?" Magnus groped inwardly for a reply to Luke's accusation and touched something old and rusted and still horribly sharp, an inward edge that he'd folded so he wouldn't cut himself—or anyone else. "Don't I know? Leaving aside that Clary was kind enough to offer her help, it seems to me the conspiracy is hardly on my side. Your entire darling community has clammed up on me, and all I want to know is what happened to the man I loved!"

He found himself breathing hard. It had been a full, harrowing day, and this was the last straw. He had no good intentions left. There was only him and the raw, unresolved hurt that still ruled his life after nine long years.

"I don't care how deep your roots go, I don't care about your fucking traditions of sacred silence, I want answers! Someone here knows something, your sister knew—"

" _Get out._ " Luke did not move, but the sheer force of his presence made that an ironclad order. "Get out of my house. You and every scrap of your goddamn investigation. Now."

"Dad—" Clary began, which was clearly also the wrong move.

"To your room," Luke grit out, and something in her caved. With a look flashed at Maia, Clary slunk past her and Magnus. "And you, _out._ If I see you anywhere near my daughter again..."

 _You'll what?_ Magnus almost spat. _Do something worse to me than what Saintshead already has?_

"Come on." This time, Maia's grip of Magnus's elbow wasn't a suggestion. "I'll help you get your stuff. You can stay with us tonight."

Through his own rattling anguish, Magnus knew he had to contradict her. He had to pull himself together. He could throw himself at the wall of Luke's protective anger until one of them buckled, but to what end? The man had kept his secrets for a lifetime.

There was one more thing Magnus had miscalculated.

"I'm going," he said, up to Luke's stony face. "Thank you for your hospitality."

He was, at least, reasonably good at knowing when things were at an end. He'd had plenty of practice at that.

 

*

 

Maia followed him up the stairs in silence. His papers were a mess on the desk: he scooped them indiscriminately into his backpack. Without asking, Maia opened his suitcase and began emptying the wardrobe into it. If he'd been more present, her efficiency would have given him pause. Now, he just collected the few books and knick-knacks that remained in the room, and came at last to Alec's sweater and compass that were still sitting on the chest of drawers.

He ran his hand over the soft-rough wool and let his heart ache for the space of a sigh. Alec hadn't asked after his things. Magnus had looked at them more than once, intending to take them back, and then gone out without them.

They'd come into his possession by necessity and then become a strange attachment. Something he'd have to give back before he could go.

"That everything?" Maia snapped the suitcase shut.

"Yes," Magnus said mechanically. He folded the sweater so the compass was tucked inside it.

"I don't have a car here, but—if you're here, I guess Alec went home? I'll call him from downstairs."

"No." Magnus pressed the bundle in her hands. "My dear—" He owed her better than semi-flippant endearments. "No. You should call Alec, to get you home, but I won't be joining you. There's some bed and breakfast nearby where I'll fit for a couple of days."

"If you're super lucky. Did you miss the part where it's July and every place with a spare bunk in the basement is crammed with tourists?" She glanced at the sweater. "This is Alec's."

"It is, and we should have the rest of this conversation somewhere else. Please."

Her mouth tightened, but she nodded. They tiptoed down the stairs. Magnus had left the typewriter borrowed from Simon at the desk; it would find its way back to its owner. The keys he dropped onto the kitchen table. The house was hushed, the doors shut, though light leaked from under the door to Clary's bedroom.

Magnus closed the front door and recalled the night he'd met Alec here on the porch: the blend of standoffish and helpful that he'd been, the way he'd come out of the dark on soft feet, an irritable savior of the lost and clueless.

_Out, out, out. Just walk away._

Maia held her peace until they were at the end of the driveway. A split boulder stuck out of the field's edge, and she hoisted herself on top of it. "Start talking."

He set down the suitcase, too tired to duck and weave. "Alec and I had a disagreement. He drove me here, which was decent of him, but I don't think he wants to see me right now. Or at all."

"What about?" Her eyes measured him.

"I... I don't want you to be caught in the middle." Apparently he had to evade a _little_. "He's your friend and co-worker. Go home and see him. Be sympathetic, make him tea. Whatever helps, I suppose."

She looked deeply unimpressed. "Listen, if I want to be patronized, I get that from every other guy on our tours that ever coughed near a lighthouse before. _And_ I get paid for it."

"Right. I'm sorry."

"So—you had a mystery row with Alec. Then you went at Luke, for reasons I kinda get, but wow, the timing was bad." She ticked off the the items on this list of calamities with her fingers. "Now you want me to dump you by the roadside and go console Alec, because of some bullshit about how I can't handle why you're fighting everybody in sight."

"I don't doubt your capability." He'd never seen her be anything but capable. Sometimes it was tinted with necessity that had become a point of pride: she managed everything, because at some point, she'd had no choice but to manage. "Nor do I enjoy the idea of being left here, but I shouldn't be above Alec in your priorities."

"You're not." She shrugged. "I'm gonna go and grill him. Like, gently. I already drove Clary's pick-up home today after she froze at the wheel."

"Oh, god, right. The—" Magnus gestured back toward the farm as if he could indicate the battered pick-up. "What in the world happened?"

Maia made a peculiar face. She was not easily shaken, but disquiet cinched the corners of her eyes. She hopped down and held out her hand. "Gimme the backpack. You've got the whole suitcase."

He raised a brow.

Her fingers crooked with some impatience. "I'm gonna walk you to the village. The Lewises have a guest room. I'll bet you Simon's still up, and anyway, I need to borrow a bike."

"You could have mine, but I'm afraid it was on loan from the farm." Magnus gave a fatalistic little sigh. 

Because it was easier to relent than argue, he let Maia share the load of his earthly belongings. They walked abreast; the road was empty as far as the eye could see.

"I'm not totally sure what happened," she said after a moment's silence. "We were almost to the farm, we were chatting, and Clary just... stopped. I thought she saw something on the road. She kept looking past me. We were at that curve where there's the old mesh fence, you know the one, and she didn't make the turn. We went straight off the road and into the fence. Hit the concrete blocks at the base."

She bounced the plastic bag with Alec's things in it on her fingers. That was almost the only fretful cue in her body language.

Magnus rearranged his face from dismay to sympathy. "You said she froze."

"That's what it seemed like. She spaced out at the wheel. She snapped out of it when we stopped. We freaked out for a bit, checked the car was just scratched up, and I drove us to the farm. You turned up pretty soon after that."

It seemed to soothe Maia to walk him through the events, so he simply let her talk. His watch showed the time as a quarter to midnight. At this hour, he truly might have ended up spending the night in someone's barn.

"Are you all right?" he asked. "I'm glad you both came through unscathed, but that's a frightening experience."

"Yeah." She hiked a backpack strap up along her shoulder, her fingers twisting into the material. "I'm more weirded out than shaken, I guess."

"Not that it's any of my business, but..." Magnus stamped down the flash of irrepressible curiosity. He was cursed with an investigator's mind, and it was a rare case of emotional distress that could entirely silence it. A part of him was still hoarding up bits and pieces of information, turning them over to see how they interlocked. "Never mind. It isn't my business."

"You were gonna ask about Clary or Luke."

"I don't want you to betray any confidences."

Looking at the drowsy meadows, blue as smoke in the moonlight, and the few solitary lights shining in the village, he began to grasp what had just happened. He'd lost not only one, but both of the two firm footholds he'd found in Saintshead. Maia was being kind, because she was a good person who wouldn't abandon him without a roof over his head, but Magnus knew where her deeper loyalties lay.

He gestured at the bag in her hand. "Please return those to Alec for me. I kept forgetting them."

 _You remembered_ , said his inner voice—one or another of the horrible choir. _Giving them back would've meant owning up to something you didn't want to admit, so you let them sit there. What use was that in the end?_

"Okay." The angle of her jaw was hard, compressed, though not with anger. "There's the clinic. Simon's got a light in his window."

"He seems easygoing, but if there's anything I should know about the family before barging in at this hour, now is a good time to tell me."

"His mom and sister are on vacation in Angel Hill. If you can deal with the unavoidable layer of teenage boy he's got on everything in the last three days, you're good."

Magnus hadn't thought himself capable of laughter, but a wan chuckle escaped him. "I'll manage. It's only until morning."

She bit down on something that remained as a restless flicker in her eyes. "Come on. Deal with the rest tomorrow."

"Morning is wiser than the night, or so they say," he said, and surely missed the balance of blithe and genuine he could usually walk like a tightrope artist. "Thank you for this."

"Don't mention it." She went for a smile, the kind that said the trouble she'd gone to was no trouble at all. It sputtered out halfway.

He could not blame her, so he just followed her through the gate in the pretty, white-painted fence, and to the porch of the lovely, mansard-roofed house behind the Saintshead clinic. As temporary havens went, Magnus had had much worse.

The thing that chilled him, a gnawing feeling in his chest, was that he had no idea what he'd do in the morning.

 

*

 

When he finally slept, on the fold-out couch in the upstairs guest room, he dreamed of the seashore again. An old dream, warping upon itself in an infinite coil.

Chalk-pale cliffs loomed in the darkness like a giant's shattered staircase. He walked barefoot across the stones, his breath shivering in his lungs. It was cold: a damp, sticky chill that made his teeth chatter and his limbs tangle. He felt like he left strips of skin behind on every step as the frost-hardened stones bit into his feet.

He had to follow the light. The beacon. The beacon on the cliff, where it had been all his life, and for years and years before.

He stumbled and landed on his hands and knees in a briny pool. His gasp broke into curling wraiths that fled as pain lanced along his skin, tinged black by the blood that welled from his palms.

Then light swept over him like a benediction. A yellow beam slit the darkness, flashed along the rock face ahead, and swam away.

He'd walked the wrong way. He only needed to turn around. Fumbling along the stones made slick by his blood, he reversed his course, turned to the light, waited for the beacon to rotate in its comforting rhythm.

Standing upright made his head spin. His fingers dripped wetly into the tide that surged around his ankles. The sea was creeping in to claim its due.

He only had to wait.

When it came, the light burst from behind him.

Caught as if by a blow, he veered and fell, and the frothing tide took him under.

He jarred awake to an unpleasant brightness behind his eyelids. Through the net curtains, the sun glowed on the band equipment piled into a corner and the reams of medical literature stacked in the bookshelf. Then it alighted on the opened suitcase on the floor.

Magnus dropped back into the couch and covered his face with his hands. They trembled minutely. The pillow was damp with his own cooling sweat.

Last night, Simon had looked befuddled but agreed to Maia's quiet request. Magnus had been too weary to do much more than mumble his thanks and teeter into the offered bed. If memory served, there was a decent-looking hotel along the road to the guest harbor. He could try his luck there for some combination of a room, a shower, and enough alcohol to gag the dulcet voices of both common sense and self-recrimination.

That was his foremost feeling. A longing to be blank, to sever himself from all the concerns that churned in him like oncoming sickness.

He knew this state of mind all too well. It had been his only cure for the pain of George's death.

He'd forced his way out of himself, out of those parts that could only live in the ever-present, all-consuming hurt. _The pain only tells you how much you loved him_ , Catarina told him one morning, shortly after the funeral Magnus hadn't attended, and Magnus nearly threw the coffee pot at his oldest, dearest friend.

 _Then I don't want it, Cat_ , he'd hissed at her. _Not any of it. What the fuck is the point of love if all it does is tear you into pieces, smaller and smaller until there's nothing left?_

Magnus shrugged into clean clothes, left Simon a thank-you note and a reasonable amount of cash for the loan of the guest room, and stole out the door. He had to keep moving. If he was going to fall apart, he should at least do it somewhere civilized—inasmuch as there was such a place to be found.

Fate tossed him a scrap of mercy: the hotel had a cancellation. It took a chunk out of his travel budget, but the tidy anonymity of the room felt like the first thing that had calmed him since his argument with Alec.

Argument. What a trifling word. He forced his thoughts away from Alec. All else he could somehow deal with, but the hours they'd spent together yesterday felt dizzying, unreal. Magnus had been close enough to taste what it might have been like to be with Alec, to share himself like he hadn't in _years_ , before it had all been dashed to pieces.

_No. Leave it. Just leave it._

He showered. He hung up his rumpled wardrobe, then steamed up the window ironing the worst offenders. The glass door that was the only means of ventilation opened to a balcony, with a wicker chair and table and a view of the harbor cove.

The day outside was a marvel: the resplendent blue of the water, the grass burnt to amber and verdigris by the heat wave, the lush, gnarled pines surrounding the wooden church on the seaside hill. Magnus took it all in and felt it stream right out again. It was such a beautiful place, and it seemed to have brought him little but misery.

By this time tomorrow, the whole village would know that Luke Garroway had thrown the nosy writer from the capital out of his home. Some of them had no doubt wondered why Luke had allowed him to stay in the first place.

That _was_ a question, Magnus admitted to himself over the bland hotel lunch. Luke knew something. Magnus had skirted around him in his investigation out of both respect and a self-preservation instinct that had utterly deserted him last night.

Magnus had been upfront about his reason—his fit-for-daylight reason—for being here. Had Luke hoped that his poking around would turn up something about Cleophas that Luke had not been able or willing to find himself?

Magnus wanted to thunk his head on the table. Instead, he bribed the bored young man tending the bar for a bottle of whiskey and smuggled it up to his room.

Somewhere along the sunny shore, Maia would have wrung the entire sad story out of Alec. Simon would be plotting to sneak Clary out of house arrest. Magnus's photographs would be journeying from Briarwood to the farm, and Luke would pick them from the mailbox and presumably toss them in the fireplace. He needed to call Cat and Ragnor and let them know—and what was it he planned to tell them? That he was coming home in defeat?

In a bout of desperation, he emptied the backpack onto the bed. The notes and loose journal pages and photocopied articles. The infuriating charcoal drawing of the man and the lantern. This mire of unconnected information had sucked him in, and now he'd wasted his summer and his chances at making any sense of it.

The whiskey was awful. Too raw and young, but it'd get him drunk.

Wasn't that an apt metaphor for what had happened with Alec, too?

The first word you'd think up to describe Alec was not _sheltered_ or _innocent_. Even going by Magnus's patchy picture of him, he seemed to have done and seen enough to rival people ten years his senior. He'd always met Magnus as an equal, on an assumption of even footing. Thus, the one time that assumption crumbled, Magnus had not been ready for it.

The cheap rice paper lamp on the ceiling swung in the breeze. He took the whiskey and wandered to the balcony hoping that it'd be cooler than the room, which was bathing him in his own sweat.

 _Twelve years down the line, those damn books come back to bite me in the ass._ It'd been so long since he'd boxed his few remaining author's copies and stuffed them in storage. Seeing the copy of his book on Alec's desk had been an intravenous shot of memory.

That should've been the first warning sign.

Magnus had arrived braced for the possibility that he'd talk to people who had known George. Perhaps his relatives. People who'd been touched by his death or the deaths of his fellows. He'd thought he was removed enough from the loss to be shielded from it.

 _I'm hardly a mandarin duck, doomed to perish from lost love_ , he'd said to Catarina. _I've dated since then._

 _Right_ , she said. _Like that time you had that string of hookups with the fabulous Miss Belcourt, who dropped you like a hot potato when she realized you were in disgrace and weren't the heir to your father's money?_

If he had a mind to, he could have hours of such conversations with Cat in his head.

_Yes, yes, my darling, you're right. You'd adore this, too: I almost tumbled a tender-hearted boy who helped me without question. He took me into his confidence and his life, and I repaid him by wrecking a thing that had kept him sane when little else would._

Before she could answer, he quieted her with another swig of whiskey. It seemed easier.

After all, he'd spent a very long time making things hard for himself.

 

*

 

The next time Magnus woke, his cheek was glued to the plastic sleeve protecting Cleophas's drawing. His last impression was of late evening and staring at the church steeple silhouetted against the sundown. Or maybe it had been the sunrise. He'd drunk with slow piety and on an empty stomach, which now reported its displeasure at being ignored.

"Oh, god." He staggered into the bathroom and drank from the tap without dignity. The nausea abated a little.

No higher power showed interest in his plight. So, with the practice of years, he scraped and sculpted and smoothed himself into a persuasive picture of dapper nonchalance. Under an overcast sky and a blustery wind, he walked to the harbor and got a very late lunch from a food cart—he'd slept round the clock thanks to the whiskey and the heaped-up stress. People came and went at the marina all the time, so he wouldn't stand out as much as on the main street in the village.

Why did that even bother him? If public opinion had ever been something to get him down, he'd never have made it this far.

If public opinion could have deterred him, he'd never have kissed a handsome officer on a pier in Kirkwall. He'd never have made that first crack about how good Second Lieutenant Early looked in his uniform, that day after the parade.

The pines on the church hill turned into a dark smear against the light-hued birch and willow of the lower slope. Magnus blinked his eyes clear.

There was an empty coffin buried in the cemetery under those pines. In all these weeks, he hadn't visited. _He's not there_ , had always been what stopped him. _He was not supposed to die. He was a good seaman, he knew his work. He was with other skilled sailors. He'd navigated these waters his whole youth._

_He was not supposed to die. It isn't fair that he's gone at twenty-two and I'm—I'm still here, shackled to this memory, dragging it everywhere I go._

_It's in my bones, and I'm still trying to run from it._

Magnus got to his feet. The dog dozing under an adjacent table broke into a surprised bark at his abrupt movement. He pushed past the tables and through the people queueing at the stalls. As soon as he had the space, he broke into a run, the satchel pounding on his hip until he tucked it up against his back.

He pelted along the gravel of the roadside and mildly regretted his choice of shoes. The physical effort paled next to the spark of purpose that had kicked him into motion, but the long shallow climb gave him time to consider.

He'd spotted a phone booth at the church parking lot. It was a particular kind of madness to make the call he was planning, but what else made sense in his life right now?

 _Graves make it real_ , Alec had told him. The complex intimacy of grief had been the first bridge between them.

The phone booth with its red signage was empty, and only a handful of cars occupied the lot. The unmortared stone wall that encircled the churchyard sprouted a cornucopia of mosses and wildflowers. Saintshead was old and small enough a place that the graves were simply scattered around the church, guarded by the pines that traditionally marked a burial ground.

After a last deep breath, Magnus dialed the number from memory.

 

*

 

He counted seven repetitions of the ringing tone. Then the receiver clinked and Alec's breathless voice, made tinny by the line, said, "Saintshead Light Station, Alec Lightwood speaking. How can I help you?"

Of course Magnus knew he'd called the office number, which Alec had given him. He didn't have the number to the house. It was still alien to have the professional greeting be the first thing he heard Alec say, his brisk courtesy somewhat foiled by the fact that he'd dashed to get the phone.

Magnus pressed his shoulders to the glass wall. _You can do this._ "Alec. I'm sorry to call you in the middle of the day."

The silence at the other end of the line was audible in its intensity.

"Maybe I should be sorry to call you at all."

Magnus winced as Alec said, low and tight, "No, yeah, it's—I wasn't expecting you. Not after what I said. It seemed pretty clear to me."

"Of course." It had been some time since Magnus had been lashed with this specific hurt. Rejection never got old, did it? His heart could always wind that into a noose to hang itself with. "I shouldn't have presumed. I'll—"

"Wait." The receiver picked up a repeating noise, maybe the click of fingernails on wood. "Just tell me."

The resignation in Alec's voice carved deeper than anger would have. Magnus closed his eyes. This had been a fool's choice, a fool's hope. "I'm wasting your time as it is."

"It'll bug me."

That was an opening the schemer in Magnus recognized. He could fix a fine hook in that tear and work it wider, and if Alec caught the barest hint of what he was doing, that would be the end of it. The fragile, fretted thread that bound them together would unravel for good.

"I'm at the cemetery," Magnus said, pruning off every circuitous quibble that tried to slide in, "and I need to talk to you. Please. I know we left things on a sour note, and I should explain."

Alec made a small sound. "I don't think you've ever asked me for anything that straight up."

"Haven't I?" Magnus wished so badly he could look at Alec. He could picture him in the office, leaned over the phone or against the door.

"No," Alec said, "not like that."

There was something quietly raw and hungry in the words, something profoundly at odds with Alec's earlier wariness. Magnus settled for, "I'll be on the church steps. For the rest of the day."

"Okay," Alec muttered, like that was all the volume he could muster, and ended the call.

Magnus hung up the receiver. Whether Alec turned up or not, he had someone to find in the churchyard.

 

*

 

His search was a short one: the sexton pruning the climbing roses by the steeple pointed him to the right row among the graves. Magnus stood a moment at the end of the row, but didn't step onto the path marked by sparsely set flagstones.

It was a journey of six hours from Kirkwall. He'd taken nine years to make it, and now it felt wrong to walk the last twenty yards.

 _You're not there_ , he thought. _Does it matter if I'm here now, or ever?_

He turned and went to sit on the stone steps of the church.

 

*

 

Two hours later, Magnus had exchanged the steps for a bench sheltered by a flowering jasmine bush. The wind bowed the pines and bit into exposed skin; he was glad he'd brought a scarf. He tried to focus on the book he'd found in his satchel, mostly in vain. He worried at a ring until it slipped from his finger and he had to hunt it down in the grass under the bench.

His nerves jangled every time someone turned into the parking lot. An elderly couple entered, toting begonias, a bag of dirt and gardening tools; the odd tourist wandered through the cemetery and peered into the church; a gaggle of teenagers lounged at a corner of the wall until the sexton chased them off.

Though the gesture made him feel like a deplorably younger version of himself, Magnus drew his heels up on the bench and dropped his head against his hand. The argument he was having with himself went something like this:

_He's not coming. He has a job to do, rather than be at your beck and call._

_Did you hear him on the phone? There was something in his voice._

_Oh, like that's not a fantasy you've wallowed in a hundred times?_

_Alec isn't like that; he keeps his word. He'd have said if he wasn't—_

"Hey."

The hushed word pulled Magnus's gaze up.

Sweat and wind had mussed Alec's hair into a thatch of black, and he'd done nothing to fix the situation. His hands were behind his back, his feet a fastidious hip-width apart. Not a military stance, but an echo of one, painting a veneer of control on him.

Magnus slid his feet to the ground. Dust striped his shoes and trouser legs. His heart surged, a clandestine tattoo in his ears. "I wasn't sure if you'd come."

Alec sharpened. "Why not?"

"Not to speculate on your motives, but I did offend you. Most people would nurse at least something of a grudge."

"So I'm _most people_ now?"

Magnus could not help the wry knit of his brows. He could barely tame the runaway roughness of his voice. "You've been singular to me from the moment I met you. Would you sit, please?"

A telltale dent appeared in Alec's cheek; self-possession and something dangerously close to longing vied for mastery of his expression. He folded to sit at the other end of the bench. "It's been a weird two days."

It sounded a great deal like _sorry_ , the way Alec said it. This was not going according to any plan Magnus had built and then torn down as he waited.

"I never meant to condescend to you," he said. "I know I can be... a lot to take in. I wear it as armor, much of the time."

"You think I don't know you have things you hide?" Alec's tone made the question rhetorical. "You didn't tell anybody else about—" He gestured vaguely, then lowered his hand "—your personal stake in the investigation. That was about the first thing you told me."

Magnus nodded. He wasn't sure if he appreciated or resented Alec's discretion in going around George's name.

"Now I kinda wonder why you never said a word about those books. If—if it was so long ago, why did it matter so much that I didn't know?"

"I hate to use the phrase, but it wasn't about you." Magnus pressed the knuckle of his thumb between his eyes. Alec was canny enough to realize, surely, that not everyone met the world with the same uncompromising frankness he did. Against that, Magnus's tendency to play his cards close to the vest might well look like purposeful duplicity.

His secrecy had been on purpose, but only in order to protect himself.

"You can't say that and not follow up."

"Quite so." Magnus took a covert breath. "Tell me one thing first, if you would."

"Shoot. I'll decide when I hear the question."

"Fair enough," Magnus said. "When you look at me, what do you see?"

Alec seemed to give it an honest-to-goodness thought. His eyes trailed over Magnus without judgment but with a fair dose of scrutiny. "You look like shit. Not that you've got a hair out of place, but that's... a lot of armor."

A stymied chuckle shook itself out of Magnus. "You can see all that, and yet you worry that I'm—what? That I think myself above you somehow?" He paused. "Please feel free to demolish that assumption."

For a second, Alec looked poised to flee. His jaw trembled and stilled. "I can guess how you feel because I've been there. I don't know exactly why you asked to meet me here, instead of like, anywhere else in the village, but I can guess that, too. It's hard to bring the grief out again, after you've managed to put it away."

"Yes. That's certainly true." Magnus fiddled with a buckle of his satchel. "And you know I meant, what do you see in _general_ , not right now."

Alec glanced away. "The other night in Briarwood, I kinda lost my head. I—I know you're not like that. Sure, you do act like the world's some giant joke and you're the only one who's in on it, but..."

Magnus felt something in him go soft with relief, unearned though it might have been. "But you were hurt by it. I hadn't been honest with you, and you deserved better."

Alec sagged against the back of the bench. "I just wondered why you bothered with me."

You could have turned that one succinct sentence around to find a reverse side full of knotted, twisted threads dangling behind it.

 _You're seven years older than him_ , Magnus reminded himself. _You decided long ago that you weren't going to apologize to the world for anything.  He's had a different fight with himself. Even if you can't be totally honest, be gentle._

It did seem like a kinder approach than the whole unvarnished truth. He could get started.

"I bother with you because I like you," he said. "You opened your door to me when almost no one else would. You and Maia have kept my head on straight all these weeks. If—if I have to go home empty-handed, this will have been worth it because I got to meet you. Both of you, but _you_ , in the singular, in particular."

Alec reddened subtly. "You're doing it again. Talking circles around me."

"I'll admit to much, but _that_ is a false accusation."

Alec made a noise like he was swallowing a laugh. "Okay then. Will you tell me what this was all about?"

As much as Magnus would have liked to coax out that glimmer of levity and feed it until it burned bright, he instead rose up. The wind leaped at him, tossing an errant end of his scarf into his face. _Nine years to make this journey, and I never would've known how I'm about to end it._

"There's someone I'd like you to meet," he said. "Walk with me?"

 

*

 

They went up a rise behind the church, where the pines opened to show the steel-gray sea rippling under the wind. At the far right edge of the family plot, Magnus found the headstone.

It was unassuming black granite, the white lettering lit by the sun as it blinked through the gathering clouds. No _in memoriam_ , no verses; only the name and dates looked back at him from the burnished stone. He dropped onto his haunches against the whispering kiss of vertigo on his brow.

It was not overwhelming. He'd come this far on steady feet. Rather it was as if a noise or a resonance he hadn't been aware of had suddenly ceased, leaving him in silence.

Alec stopped behind his left shoulder. "I figured this was it."

Some solicitous relative had planted a rose bush between the headstones. It had rained tightly curled blossoms, tawny and brown, onto the grass covering the plot.

Magnus said, "I owe you a story. It is... also about our trip to Briarwood, though the route rambles quite a bit."

"I didn't want to ask." Alec stuck his hands in his pockets. "It's not the kind of thing you get to ask. And I get why you didn't talk about him to anybody. This isn't Kirkwall. People can be backwards about something like, uh, one of their brave local soldier boys being gay. Sorry."

"He wasn't." Magnus was comforted rather than offended by Alec's candidness. "But his family certainly wanted him to find a nice girl and settle down. The military wasn't kind to him. I don't know if it's gotten any better since."

"I had a couple of buddies who knew. It really depends on what kind of assholes you end up serving with."

Magnus smiled up at Alec, mellowed by empathy. "At least I grew into this among liberal arts students and counterculture activists. The circles of Kirkwall weren't much, but they saved me."

"It's kind of funny, I guess, that you figuring it out helped me do the same," Alec said, his eyes focused on the distance. "Keep talking."

As soothing as it was to talk like this again, to ease back into the rapport they'd developed, caution pinged against Magnus's mind. This was uncharted ground.

"I told you we—George and I—were together while I was in university. He was a young career soldier. We used to debate it, his devotion to this... idea of the motherland, to your roots, how he could care so much about where he came from. I fancied myself a pacifist. I wanted to think on a larger scale, as you do at twenty." Magnus picked up a tumbled blossom and twirled it between his fingers. "We found common ground in our family histories. I loathed mine, and he was at loggerheads with his. We used to spend holidays together, when everyone else went home."

"I never would've dared," Alec mumbled. Magnus shifted closer, his shoulder in line with Alec's side.

"We had two good years. Then it all spiraled." How small words were, specks of sound trying to encompass the enormity of that ruin, and yet, how possible it was to say that. "He'd rethought his situation. Kirkwall was too big. There was a base close to his childhood home, and he had a better chance of advancement, and he'd been talking to his mother—" Magnus flicked the rose away. "I couldn't understand any of it. It was like this bright, courageous, compassionate man I knew had turned on his heel and become someone else."

The sun went into cloud again above the sea. Froth broke along the backs of the waves. Carefully, Alec sat down on his left.

"So we fought. I couldn't move to some backwater just when I was courting the literature scene of the capital. George wasn't even out to his parents." Magnus had finally reached a tipping point: the words kept pouring out into the open air, into Alec's rapt silence beside him. "He got his transfer. I slept on Ragnor's couch and refused to go home until he was gone. Nine months later, his father called me, asked if I was one of George's Kirkwall friends, and—and said he was dead."

"You never forget that moment, right?" Magnus turned to look at Alec's uptilted silhouette and made his body ease, shoulders, back, the knots of tension in his palms.

"No." Not that Magnus had not tried; he'd nearly destroyed himself in the attempt. "I suppose it's time I accept I never will."

"Do you feel like you want to?" Alec's phrasing was unusually soft. "I—I always thought I couldn't. Like it wouldn't be right."

_Like it's your burden to bear, because you put him there. If you'd made him stay, he never would've died._

"I want to ask you something," Magnus said. "You don't have to answer. How did you lose your brother?"

Alec gathered himself for whatever he was going to say next. "Car accident. The weather was bad, I was driving him home after practice—I was on leave, and our parents were busy—and—" He raised a blocking palm at Magnus's voiceless hum of sympathy. "It's fine. I want to tell you."

"May I?" Magnus touched Alec's shoulder, fingertips to the fabric of his windbreaker, and clasped it as Alec shifted into the contact. He remained there, motionless, braced against Magnus's hand.

"Max died in my arms. I didn't even know he had before I woke up in the hospital." Alec balled his hand into a fist, then opened it, an anxious reflex. Before he could think twice, Magnus slid his hand over to meet Alec's. Alec's fingers folded through his own and squeezed down. "The window caved in from the impact, and the shrapnel sliced my head open. I wasn't lucid anymore by the time the paramedics got there."

"That's what the scars are from."

Alec touched his free hand to the left side of his neck and the neat diagonal of the long-healed gash there. "Yeah. And that's why I'm here."

"With a few detours, surely." Magnus resisted the urge to put his head on Alec's shoulder. Tension thrummed too hard in Alec's grip, in contrast to the heavy, quiet sadness that filled Magnus himself.

"I tried other places. Two or three times. This seemed to be the first one that worked."

 _Because it was far enough from everything that could remind you_ , Magnus thought but did not say.

He had no real notion of how long they'd been here, but the afternoon was waning into evening. There was no sound of voices or movement on the hill, only the rushing of the pines and the clap of a loose shingle somewhere on the church roof.

"I'm sorry," he said, and then drew gently back. Alec clung to his hand for a second before letting go.

"Thanks for not going 'it wasn't your fault'," Alec muttered. "I've heard that one about ten thousand times. Even the accident investigation agreed. The other driver ran a red light. The—the facts lined up." He'd meant to say something else there.

"Don't make yourself walk through it for me. I don't need the details." Magnus didn't know how much of the strain in Alec was sorrow and how much guilt, but he had no desire to push either emotion.

"Right." Relief joined the line-up, and Magnus breathed a little easier.

They unwound slowly from the moment. The wind scattered dry pine needles onto their heads. Alec picked a couple from his collar. "Oh, another fun thing about the seaside. One day you have actual summer, the next it feels like a cranky day in September."

Magnus let out a tiny laugh. They brushed themselves off and stood up. There were grass stains on Alec's knees, and the air was turning humid under the creeping twilight.

"So," Magnus said, "all of this was a lengthy preamble to why it's... difficult for me to talk about my early works. George was there for both of them. There's as much of him as there is of me in those books. Of course, once a book is out, it's no longer mine. It belongs to whoever reads it. Like you, as it happens."

Alec made a somewhat abashed face. "I've had two days to sit on the porch and tell myself I'm an idiot. Maia's really sick of telling me I'm not. I know that was out of line, what I said to you in Briarwood."

"It could've been worse. You could've left me to hitchhike my way back."

It felt astonishingly good to hear Alec give, not even a full laugh, but a tart, self-ironic chuckle. "I almost did. You know, just to be petty."

"Then I'm glad for your generosity of spirit. Even toward those who vex you." Just because he wanted to, Magnus rested his hand on Alec's upper arm.

Thus, he felt Alec stiffen. His muscles went taut as if to absorb a physical impact. It wasn't Magnus's touch; he didn't try to pull away.

The wind raked the trees like the strings of an instrument out of tune, a whooshing, creaking cacophony. The boats in the marina below bobbed and tilted in their moorings. A sunshade tipped over on the pier, a brief flash of jaunty orange. It looked like someone had spilled an ink bottle across the sky: bruise-colored thunderheads were building into a broad, towering bank against the sallow blue.

"Is that a storm? I thought the forecast said the sky would clear." Weather, that most banal of subjects, but Magnus had to try for Alec's attention. It was as if he'd stepped sideways from himself, his eyes pinned on something Magnus could not see.

"Magnus," he said, in a quiet, intense voice that sent a shiver along Magnus's skin. Not a warm or welcome shiver, but a foreboding one.

"I'm here."

That made Alec turn to him. His face was strange: his pupils looked too wide for the daylight, dim as it was, and his brows were scrunched in some combination of apologetic and resolved. "I'm really sorry."

"For what?" Magnus slotted his hand behind Alec's head with easy presumption. "Briarwood? I thought we just settled that."

Alec covered Magnus's hand with his own. His palm was overly warm, the skin dry and flushed. "I have to get back to the light station. And you should come with me."

"I—how did you come here? As it happens, I no longer have a bicycle at my disposal."

"I heard." Alec crooked his mouth. It made him look more like himself. "Listen. There's more I need to tell you. Things I've needed to tell you for a while. But I've got to—"

"Get back. You said."

"Maia needs me." Magnus heard the inexorable truth of that. "We have a weather station at the lighthouse. I checked the readings three hours ago. _Nothing_ suggested thunderstorm conditions. Those clouds shouldn't be there. Do you get what I'm saying?"

 _I don't and I do._ They'd been here before, only then, it had been Magnus cautiously extending the possibility that things did not quite follow the established laws of nature in this place.

Now Alec was offering the idea that Magnus's misgivings were more than conjecture and the tricks of an overworked imagination. That this abrupt change in the weather had a more sinister origin than a stray cold front.

A wiser person would've decided that their daily quota of revelations was overflowing, and gone back to the hotel. Magnus could only look at Alec and understand that he was being torn more ways than he could go.

He had a little faith, and there was no one more deserving of it.

"All right," he said. "We have an incoming freak weather phenomenon, one bicycle between us, and—how far is it to the light station? Mostly downhill, in any case. I don't think I've ridden double since I was nineteen and my bike was stolen outside the seediest bar in Kirkwall."

Alec stared at him with a captivating mixture of dry mirth and elation, dashed with some close cousin of awe. "You're coming." It was not a statement. It rose into a wavering tail.

"You're asking me to trust you." Magnus slid his hand down to grasp Alec's again. "You have yet to lead me astray."

"Okay." Alec rested his brow on Magnus's temple, a clear, silent gesture of gratitude. Then, without breaking the handhold, he pulled Magnus along into a run.

 

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As ever, comments sustain me, so please leave me a word (or yell at me, politely)! ♥


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